Reading Challenge Prompt: A book from a celebrity book club

This was an Oprah book club pick. It was a good read. I wasn't a big fan of the author's writing style.

A cumbersome and unhurried story of sufferings and hope that is simple and ragged, but never seems to keep a winning pace. This couple’s misfortunes are sometimes unbelievable.

“The hardest work I did on Gap Creek was trying to get the voice right,” says Robert Morgan, who has been called the poet laureate of Appalachia. The voice, as it happens, is of seventeen-year-old Julie Harmon. At seventeen, she’s a good girl, and strong, working as hard as a man alongside her father in this gritty, realistic portrayal of life in late-nineteenth-century North Carolina.

Morgan starts us off with the depiction of a horrifying illness in the very first chapter. When her younger brother dies, followed a bit later by her father, Julie becomes the head of the family, caring for her mother and sisters until a handsome boy passes through the holler. After a few weeks, she and the boy, Hank, marry and move the distance of a day’s walk to Gap Creek. Since homes are few and far between, they rent a room with a stinky, lewd and mean old widower in exchange for Julie’s serving as the maid and housekeeper. While Hank works at a distant mill, Julie cleans, cooks, tends the fields and the farm animals, splits and hauls wood and even butchers a hog, the rendering of whose fat causes disaster. Written in a voice similar to Cold Mountain, Gap Creek tells the story of a can-do kind of young woman who works so hard it hurts your back to read about it.

Morgan portrays the delicate evolution of a marriage, and of a girl trying to define her identity in relation to the union, a timeless theme for sure, but one made more nuanced by the circumstances in which Julie lives. On one level this is a love story, comparable to that of any impoverished but earnest young couple determined to carve out an existence in their world.

It’s just that their world is so Darwinian. Julie’s strength and skills are essential in a time and place where the only food you eat is what you can raise or kill yourself; the only shelter you live in is what you build or maintain alone. Medical care is a matter of family knowledge handed down for better or worse from generation to generation. Superstition carries unquestioned curative or destructive power. She and Hank live at the meanest edge of subsistence, with no electricity or running water, and just one injury, illness, or crop failure between death and survival.

Morgan use simple descriptions to transport us into Julie’s everyday world:
t“I stepped out to the back porch and looked in the yard. Like in any backyard, there was a woodshed and a smokehouse, a clothesline, a path to the toilet on the right, and a path to the spring on the left. And further out there was a barn and hogpen. The washpot was on the trail to the spring. And there was a table and a wooden tub on the trail next to the pot. I looked around the porch and found a washboard and a bucket. And by the water bucket was a cake of Octagon soap.
t“I grabbed that bucket and carried several gallons of water from the spring and poured them in the pot. And then I got some kindling and wood from the shed and started a fire under the pot…it took me four trips just to carry Mr. Pendergast’s clothes out to the wash table.”

Earnest, loyal and naïve – but not stupid – Julie isn’t daunted by the need to work like a mule. In a metaphor for her resilience, she finds solace in hard work. Hank is weak, a whiner, impulsive, with a bad temper. The two of them weather fire, flood, extortion, swindling, poverty and hunger. She is so much stronger than him, but by the end of the story he changes.

The challenges are endless, the struggle Sisyphean. She works and works, yet the problems never slow down, and her effort seemingly pointless in clawing some security from the soil. What, I wonder, was Morgan trying to tell us? He said the book is based on his grandmother, that he wanted to explore what life was like for women who worked so hard for everybody else. Examples of hard work? How about washing and dressing a dead man? Butchering a hog? In that sense the story is a portrait of self-sufficiency, and the kind of strength you don’t see so much anymore.

There is a primitive rawness to the world in which Julie lives, leaving little indication of divine intervention. In two major scenes she seems deflated by the world’s indifference, given over to an existentialist’s sad musings:
t“I sat there on the cold ground feeling that human life didn’t mean a thing in this world. People could be born and they could die, and it didn’t mean a thing…little Masenier was dead. There was nothing we could do about it, and nothing cared except Papa and me. The world was exactly like it had been and would always be, going on about its business.”

When Julie “finds religion” it’s more a matter, I think, of finding community with other earnest human beings, and garnering strength from their friendship. She is helped and is grateful, and in this Morgan makes a profound yet subtle affirmation of the essential bond between human beings.

In the end, this book is about innate strength, and the courage to make a life, to enjoy carnal and spiritual love, and to battle hard luck and crushing circumstance. I found it inspiring.

A fairly easy read but I was very annoyed with Julie, she was so naive and foolish I wanted to give her a good shake, and it was just getting a bit more interesting then it ended. OK but not the best of its kind.

Best description of a first kiss ever! And oh my goodness the birth of her child I will never forget. Such depth and beauty in this book. It also teaches a woman to be strong. Many favorite lines but the best two are: 1. "Worry never let anyone live a second longer." -Hank 2. Everything I'd done was free. the sweat was free as water from the spring, as air in sunlight. But the greatest free gift was time that kept comin' day after day. It seemed that time couldn't go on after the death of little Dillia but it did...time kept on spillin' down on me and the only way I could take hold of the minutes and make sense of them was to work."
I would love to read Morgan's acclaimed novel, The Truest Pleasure, which he wrote before GC.

This book and I have some history. It's the kind of cover and premise that would have attracted me since I was just little. I sought it out again recently because Jess Sowards (from Roots and Refuge) had recommended it, knowing that I had at one point bought it and given it away before finishing it, but not really remembering why.

I'm glad I didn't read more than the first chapter when I started it at 17 years old. I think I was horrified by the way Julie's little brother died and didn't think I could handle the rest. Reading it now, as a 24-year-old wife of only a year, this story touched me in a much deeper way than it would have at that age.

***(There are also important elements of the story that rest on Julie and Hank's relationship as a married couple, which includes some semi-explicit -- my opinion -- bedroom scenes. I am glad I did not read these before getting married.)***

Normally I don't love stories written by men from a woman's perspective, but this one holds out. Julie is the narrator of the story and I found her perspective on life so refreshing from a female protagonist. Her life has held so much sorrow but she isn't a sort of Cinderella or a martyr about it. I was inspired by her pluckiness and resourcefulness in holding so much responsibility, especially in feeding her family. Since I love food history and preservation so much, I dearly loved the descriptions of her canning, foraging, and making use of what she found.

There are a lot of "just when you think it can't get any worse" moments in Gap Creek, but while it did make me cry, I never felt drug down. I guess that's because the sun always kept coming up and Julie and Hank always manage to return to their love or one another.

I was mildly bothered by the way Hank treats Julie sometimes, but I thought it very realistic of the way someone like him would be. Everything that bothered me about this book, I knew it was right that it bothered me. And I don't have much time for a book that doesn't bother me at all.

It's the kind of book that comes to life off the page, makes you think about the world differently, causes you to look hard at your life, and then sticks with you a long time, like an earthy aftertaste of strong herbal tea. I listened to it on audio and it was very well done, but I am going to hunt down another copy to hold in my hands again, because a book this precious is something I will need to revisit.

Uhhhhh.... What exactly was the point of what I just read??!!! Oh, there wasn't one???!!! Ok. Just checking. Was this bad? No. Boring at times, yes.

I mean this is a Oprah 's book club read....the praise for it is borderline overwhelming. But, I just can't gush. I can't tell you it was horrid. I'm not going to remember this book. The only memorable moment was the baby death scene. Even that wasn't written extraordinarily well.

The characters were hard to get to know. None were
super likeable
likeable. And, what was up with the baby sister jealousy? Those moments really bothered me.

Meh. 2.5 stars. Not for me.

This book was an Ophra selection in its day and as such is very depressing, doom and gloom book, where the main character has to fight the whole world. Unlike some of her other selections – this one keeps you entranced through the whole story. Julie Harmon is 16 when she marries Hank and moves down the mountain to Gap Creek. In the months before her marriage her brother and father die – and then the man whose house they move to, wear Julie keeps house for their rent, he dies shortly after. And things get worse.

Despite one disaster after another – Julie is a character who is just so lovable – she is very young, and very faithful to her religion, and loves her young husband. She digs her feet in and refuses to let life beat them. Her story is really looking at life through the eyes of innocence – but as her character experiences life she learns and grows in ability. This is a book worth reading – and while there is no happy ending – the ending leaves you with the knowledge that just maybe things will be different.

Robert Morgan's "Gap Creek" is written in a simple manner, easy to read, but raw. If you think your life is rough, read this book. The primary root of trouble in this story is the land of Gap Creek itself. In fact, the earth itself is so extraordinarily pervasive and alive, that Morgan almost allows it to become its own rich, cumbersome but generous character. In this story, the land of Gap Creek rears itself up and fights against the main characters Julie, Hank and the other mountain people on the boarder of South Carolina at the turn of the century. Death, floods, winter storms, poverty, childbirth, accidents... they were as common place as the amount of work on the homestead that Julie went through from sun up to sun down. Morgan also depicted Julie as the earth itself; she struggled against it, but it made her who she was. Although it wore out both Julie and Hank, the land itself forged their character for better or for worse. There were no pretenses in this book; the sheer arduous difficulty of life brought out quickly each character's true inner person, testing them and causing them to change in ways they probably would not have, had they been born in another century or town.

This short excerpt is taken from my full review on Into the Hall of Books. Read more here: http://www.intothehallofbooks.com/201...


There are no words that I can use to adequately describe to anyone how much I truly love this book. It's not only the story itself, nor just the author, but the time and the place. Robert Morgan is from the area that he has written about in this story and it is obvious in reading his work; there is an ease with his setting and a comfort as well. He has written an honest depiction of this time and the struggles that it carried as well as the day-to-day activities of living back during this time in our history, which I love. He is able to write from a young female perspective in a shockingly easy way and I love how he wrote Julie Richards. I recommend Gap Creek to fans of historical fiction, fans of American history, fans of the Appalachian region, fans of doggone good books, and fans of great, incredible, wonderful characterization. This book isn't unicorns and rainbows all the way through but neither was this time in American history - however the hopeful ending is wonderful and I hope adult fiction readers will pick it up and give it an honest chance.

It's amusing that this novel is recommended by the Oprah Book Club juggernaut alongside Faulkner, because Morgan is trying for the Faulkner unreliable narrator, first-person regional dialect. I don't think he's entirely successful, though.

The dust jacket let us know he's from North Carolina mountain stock, and the setting feels pretty authentic. I think it's late 1800s or around the turn of the century, but it's not entirely clear. I do wish that had been more obvious, but then the narrator, Julie Richards, is clearly uneducated and fairly unobservant. She’s more of a reporter of events, which are mostly tragedies. I couldn’t help but compare it to My Antonia, which is a similar tale of hardship (this time on the prairie) but with significantly more literary aplomb. It’s clear that Morgan did extensive research, and he certainly seems to have his facts and details right, but all that comes at the expense of the narrative; it feels self-conscious and I found myself easily distracted. The words he puts in Julie’s mouth overcompensate for his being a man writing in a female voice, and she is forced to give clunky exposition.

I could never wrap my mind around the characterization of either Julie or her husband Hank; the tertiary characters, on the other hand, are given distinct personalities, though we are told more than we see. Hank in particular is an enigma, and I don’t think it does the story any favors to have him be so mysterious and hostile. The conclusion wasn’t particularly satisfying, though I was relieved that the sadness was over, at least.

Hard work is what a marriage takes. This book is written by a man, but is from the perspective of a woman. He did a good job about this and showing all the work that the woman did in that time era. There are some very sensual parts about this book and I find the depth of the relationship was lacking a bit because we did not hear them converse with each other much or express feelings toward each other. The main conversation was more about how they griped at each other and Julie was so independent of doing things for herself. It was almost like there was a pride in the fact that she worked so hard that she did not need any help from her husband unless she was on her death bed. Some really sad moments in this book, but I feel it was an accurate portrayal of what life was like at the time.