ABOUT
It started with two characters.
One, an other-worldly mute girl, the daughter of a broken miner. She showed me the southern coal fields of West Virginia—a land of buried history, a battleground in jeopardy, generations of courageous people, and an ancient burial mound in the way of progress.
The other, a Manhattan sociologist, with her own buried history. Her eyes revealed this same West Virginia town from an outsider’s view as she conducts a year-long study of a declining mining town. And, on a personal level, she needs to discover if DNA is destiny.
These two characters are brought together by a murder/homicide that forces each to face her deepest fears of what this town represents for them.
What they experience is nothing short of resurrection.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K.J. Bryant lives and writes in Pittsburgh, but spent four years traveling the roads of southern West Virginia confronting buried history and learning about an industry that wants to keep it that way. No longer tied to a job or husband and with two grown kids, she was able to immerse herself into the uncharted landscape of her debut novel, Reclaiming Grace.
The story’s narrator, a sociologist from Manhattan, takes the author along on her one-year study of this West Virginia coal mining town. Although K.J.’s novel takes place in 1992, in order for her to portray her characters accurately, she first had to learn about 150+ years of coal mining in Appalachia and the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed insurrection in the United States other than the Civil War. Why did 10,000 coal miners take up arms and how does that almost forgotten battle impact their descendants?
Along the way, K.J. found out what a writer really has to do to tell an authentic story. Research, of course. But more important, learn to see into the heart and soul of a culture the rest of the country dismisses with convenient stereotypes. Luckily, she found the most surprising guides.
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