Appalachian Mountain Girl

One woman’s “affecting and well-written” memoir of growing up with twelve siblings in rural Kentucky, and returning as an adult (Kirkus Reviews).

Appalachian Mountain Girl is a sensitive and beautifully written autobiographical account of a childhood in the coalmine district of Depression-era Kentucky. With humor and warmth—but without sentimentality—Rhoda Warren recounts the lives of these mining people whose religion and family values buttressed and sustained them. As a young girl, Rhoda began to catch glimpses of the world outside her narrow mountain community through the stories in True Confessions magazine and the pictures in the Montgomery Ward catalog—which to her seemed like visions of a fairy world. Much later, after poverty drove her family to Wyoming and then Rhoda married and moved to a small town in New York State, it seemed that her dreams of a better life had finally been realized.

Yet scenes of Letcher always hovered in the back roads of her memory. When she revisited her homeland, this time as a New Yorker, Rhoda found that Letcher was no longer the place she recalled—and in this vivid memoir, she contemplates the relationship between our past and our present and the ways that our childhood stays with us forever.