The subtitle of this book is "The Story of a Marriage." Well, it is that, in the same sense that "Moby-Dick" is the story of a whale. It is the story of growing up, of living a hardscrabble rural life, of learning the ways of the world, of discovering one's own strength, and of coming to terms with grief. Morgan creates a vivid main character, Julie, who is wholly believable and whom I rooted for all the way. I recommend this book.

The Gap by Robert Morgan A story of a marriage. A sad short book that is full of tragedy resiliency and sadness. A couple marries and travels to N Carolina. They end up settling in with an elderly cantankerous man. The woman cares for him while her husband works. Then tragedy hits and doesn’t stop with a fire or a flood or death. It just keeps coming. They overcome difficulties if struck in todays world would have killed us. They hold onto faith and positivity from within. Their pure love gets them through even in the worst of time.

Do you want to feel amazingly lazy?
Then read this book!
The by-line title of this novel should read: horribly hard work is good for you.
And it is true.
Now the actual by-line is: A story of a marriage.
That is why I decided to pick it up. Romance among lusty singles is not hard to write.
Describing loyal, tough,committed love while tethered to an imperfect, selfish human being is something altogether different.
The first two chapter are tough; very depressing in that I-guess-every-one-is-going-to-die-a-hideous-painful-death-in-this-book, kinda depressing.
I almost gave up.
I do not have time to be more depressed.
If you keep with it, like I did, you will get immersed into the story of Julie Harmon, which is ultimately a wise and hopeful story, despite a lot of sadness and injustice.
Part of this reads almost like an adult Laura Ingalls Wilder book in that author Robert Morgan goes into great detail what a self-sufficient homestead in the 19th century looks like.
Part of this reads almost like a turn of the century Hemingway novel with its minimal, poetic sentences about the realities of love and life.
Part of this reads like a Leif Enger novel as it examines what a genuine lived out faith in God looks like on a person, without being a preachy, religious book.
Note: this is not a Christian publication it is novel that simply examines faith.
Gap Creek, though being primarily about Julie has a terrific cast of characters. From a mother in law you wish you could slap, to the scary town drunk, to a spoiled little sister who flirts with your husband, to crafty con artists who steal your money, to preachers who actually show up and care, and of course her husband who despite being "the man of the house"has a whole lot of growing up to do.
I would say that the theme of the novel is:
Hard work in an unjust world full of suffering is its own reward, but one has to fight just as hard as one works, to keep having hope in the bigger, brighter, higher things orchestrating life in this world.
My favorite passage:
"As the preacher spoke I seen how it was such a little thing to be humble and to accept the gift of life, to face the future, to look at the future calmly. It was different from speaking in tongues, and it was different from the kind of frenzy and rapture you hear about. It was the still, small voice I wanted to hear. I didn't want to be wrenched-apart by feeling. I wanted to be calm and open and wise as the light on New Year's morning. "
The last three sentences especially I want to paste on a wall in my house.
This book would make a terrific book club.
Plus, it is already has the official Oprah seal of approval, so I am sure there is ton of online book discussion fodder out there.

Actually, did not finish. I got about 13% in and I just couldn't read anymore. It's in the first person, with grammar/language the way a back woods girl might have had. So that in and of itself was getting tiring. It starts out with the girl's little brother dying from some gruesome parasitic worms... absolutely disgusting. Then the dad dies from tuberculosis (pretty sure that's what "lung disease" he had). She meets her future husband and their kiss is a bit descriptive and so idk, got to thinking what if it goes in more detail after they're married

Robert Morgan's novel documents the fortunes of a struggling young couple in turn-of-the-century Appalachia.

Some novels simply aren't destined to stand out on bookstore shelves. Take, for example, ''Gap Creek,'' Robert Morgan's third novel, which staggers from the fall publishing gate with what a focus group might call identity issues. First there's the cover art, which is soft, indistinct. Then there's the old-timey title, which is sturdy enough but doesn't exactly say, as the best book titles do, ''Pleased to meet you.'' Robert Morgan, sad to say, isn't the most electrifying name, either. ''Gap Creek'' is, in other words, an easy book to ignore. Don't.

Robert Morgan teaches at Cornell University, in upstate New York, but he's a son of Appalachia -- specifically the densely wooded mountains along the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, where almost all his fiction is set. Morgan is a voracious student of rural life in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries, and his books are crammed with the minutiae of daily life, so much so that you can almost take them into the woods in place of a survival manual. His novels -- The Hinterlands'' (1994), ''The Truest Pleasure'' (1995) and now ''Gap Creek'' -- contain more raw information about how to scratch together an existence on an isolated, electricity-free farm than all the back issues of Country Living combined. You may think you couldn't care less about how to, say, build a road, or render lard, or suck the venom from a snakebite, or pluck and singe a wild turkey or lay a body out for burial. But in Morgan's hands these details become the stuff of stern, gripping drama; you're as hooked, and frequently you're as horrified, as if you were reading the final pages of Robert Falcon Scott's journals.

''Gap Creek,'' which is narrated by a flinty 17-year-old girl named Julie Harmon, opens with two prolonged death scenes, and the tension never appreciably slackens. First, Julie's much younger brother falls ill with a mysterious, lingering sickness and dies gruesomely, ultimately coughing up mouthful after mouthful of tiny white worms. Not long after, her father dies following a long bout with ''chest consumption.'' Doctors were scarce in rural North Carolina at the turn of the century, when ''Gap Creek'' takes place, and even a mid-grade fever could be as spooky as a cancer diagnosis seems today. The characters here spend a lot of time agonizing, and arguing, over how best to care for the ill. Which herbs might work best? Do you pile blankets on your patient or stick him in a cold bath? These disputes usually end when someone whips up a ''tonic,'' often corn whisky mixed with tea. Everyone, including the patient, ends up feeling a little better -- but not much, and not for long.

''Gap Creek'' isn't as much about sickness, however, as it is about brute physical labor. Morgan is among the relatively few American writers who write about work knowledgeably, and as if it really matters; you don't begrudge him the 10 or so pages he'll spend describing, for example, how to kill a pig and conserve every last ounce of the fat and meat, right down to the brains. His penniless characters worry about making it through the long winters, and their lives frequently depend on getting small jobs done right. In ''Gap Creek,'' Julie goes about slaughtering this pig with the kind of fervor that, in other books, men bring to digging firebreaks.

Even before her father falls ill, Julie works punishing hours on the family farm. ''Julie can work like a man,'' her mother says as her daughter lugs another armful of firewood into the house. (Julie puts it somewhat differently: ''If there was a hard job to be done,'' she says, ''it just had to be me that done it.'') She's a tomboy who never found time to ''prettify myself and primp,'' and thus she's stunned when a capable and handsome young man named Hank courts and quickly marries her. Their first kiss sends her into orbit: ''This is not me,'' Julie thinks to herself. ''This is better than me. This is better than I deserve.''

When Hank and Julie move over the mountain into South Carolina, where they board in an old house in Gap Creek with an elderly widower, they feel that their lives have turned a corner. Hank gets a job making bricks; Julie sets up housekeeping. But almost from the start, everything runs off the rails. Hank loses his job and grows distant and bitter; the widower (who turns out to be lecherous and cruel) dies a terrible death from injuries he receives in a grease fire, leaving the couple to wonder if they'll now be kicked out of the house. A winter flood kills their only cow; many of their chickens die as well. There's a glimmer of hope when Hank and Julie find a jar of money that the old man has squirreled away over the years, but a con artist who poses as an attorney for the local bank soon tricks them out of that. Another pair of swindlers cheat them out of the few dollars they have left. They begin to feel like prey.

This is only the beginning of Hank and Julie's woes -- there is much, much worse to come -- and some readers may begin to feel that Morgan overdoes it, that he has rather cynically stacked the deck against his characters. The sense of doom can be overwhelming; you begin to feel, as you sometimes do when reading Cormac McCarthy's or Harry Crews's early novels, that the author has been typing with blood on his hands and a good deal of it has rubbed off onto your shirtsleeves.

''Gap Creek'' never becomes a mere stew of sour feeling, however; Morgan is too adept at evoking the small pleasures that can be smuggled into any married life. After one particularly bad fight, Julie and Hank climb into bed, not expecting to touch each other, let alone have sex. When they do begin to have sex, greedily, there's a hilarious moment when Julie's ecstasy takes an unexpected form: ''I seen bright strawberries, and carrots and tomatoes,'' she says dreamily. ''I seen Red Delicious apples and shelled peas and boiled taters. I seen new potatoes in butter and sweet milk. I seen ripe pears so big you couldn't hardly take a bite out of them. I seen grapes so ripe and tight they would bust on your tongue.'' Amid all the tumbleweed that blows across this novel's arid emotional landscape, these moments pop out at you like wildflowers.

Morgan's come-as-you-are prose brings pleasures of its own. As novelists go, he's not a long-ball hitter; his sentences rarely build to intellectual or emotional crescendos. What you get instead is the satisfying whack-whack-whack of a writer who's satisfied belting out a string of singles, with the occasional double thrown in just to show you he's capable of it. Morgan couldn't write a longueur if you put a gun to his head. He may not have anything like the range Charles Frazier displayed in ''Cold Mountain,'' a novel that this one resembles in some superficial ways, but this rarely feels like a defect. At their finest, his stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams's best songs. Even better, there's not a hint of liberal sanctimony in his work; his plain people stubbornly refuse to become archetypes.

''Gap Creek'' sent me scurrying back to find Morgan's two previous novels, and in some respects I wish I hadn't read them. Morgan is not a writer whose work you want to devour in bulk, for a simple reason -- he's gone to the well too many times for the same themes, and sometimes for the same scenes and sentences. Both ''The Hinterlands'' and ''The Truest Pleasure'' are solid, well-built books, but when you read them back-to-back with ''Gap Creek'' a nagging sense of dej vu kicks in; you begin to realize that certain moments (escapes from rabid animals, women forced to give birth alone in their cabins) appear more than once, and often in language that doesn't change much from book to book. Reading Morgan's early books can feel like watching someone mess around with a set of Lincoln Logs; the buildings may look great, but the number of variations is sorely limited. ''Gap Creek'' is where he finally puts all the pieces together.

In the novel's final pages, Morgan's sentences begin to cut to the bone. Julie has become pregnant, and there's no milk to be had -- in fact, there's little food to be had at all. ''It's shameful to admit that you have been hungry, that you have been hungry as a grown woman,'' Julie says. The couple's sense of isolation has been so keenly evoked that when some neighbors show up with a small gift, two jars of homemade jam and some baby clothes, the scene is almost absurdly moving. Julie is malnourished, and her baby is born prematurely: ''Her fingers and toes was tinier than match heads,'' she says. ''Her little arms was the size of my fingers.'' When Julie's milk fails to come in and this minuscule baby begins to cry night after night, I'd reached my own breaking point -- I wanted to cry uncle and go bury this novel in my backyard, someplace where it wouldn't slip into my dreams. I couldn't take any more, and I mean that as a compliment.
By DWIGHT GARNER October 10, 1999, Dwight Garner is an editor at the Book Review.

After almost reading halfway through the book I just couldn't do it any more. This is just not the book for me. Very depressing and too much inappropriate stuff. I would rather use my time to read some more worthy...krb 4/21/17

My first impression when I started reading Gap Creek was that I would not like the story or the voice of the narrator. Once I got myself into the correct mindset of the time and place where this takes place it became a much better experience.

It is a snapshot of the struggles of a very young couple trying to make a life together against great odds. It is told from the first-person point of view by Julie, a 17-year-old girl who marries a young man who she does not really know very well. It is the end of the 19th century in the Western Carolinas and life is not kind to the young penniless couple. In the end, they have grown in their knowledge of the world and each other.

Had this on my TBR for a long time. - check

make it a 3.5

Oh, this book…I like and loathe it at the same time. Julie is to be admired. Hank really, really…ugh! At times, I like him; other times, I despise him. Yes, just like the book itself!

“Don’t you worry…Worry never made anybody live a second longer” (44).

“When you have a filthy job the only thing to do is jump in and get it done. Won’t hurt your hands to get dirty; you can always wash them” (60).

“‘Everybody looks younger in death…I wonder why…’ ‘Because they have stopped worrying…All the grief goes out of them, if they went to heaven’” (113).

Julie is precious. Here is part of her heartfelt prayer: “Life with Hank is going to be hard, as everybody’s life is hard. Give me the strength to face the pain, and to eat the pain like bread. And give me the sense to know joy and to accept joy. For I know I’m weak and can’t sustain myself alone. Teach me to accept what is give to me” (247). That last line, Lord, have mercy, that needs to be my prayer, too!

“In the worst times there is, you can only get through with the support of other people” (250).

“The world wouldn’t have lasted this long if women didn’t help each other” (257).

“The world would be a better place if people helped each other more” (257).

In the midst of unbelievable pain, Julie feels, “The only sweetness in the world I could think of was that Jesus might be looking down on me with love and concern. There was nobody else to see me in my misery. There was nobody else to help me through. ‘Please, Jesus…show me some mercy’” (283).

I had read this once before, but when it showed up in the astonishing stack of books my aunt sent me recently I thought it was time for another visit with the Richards family down in the valley. The theme I liked the most in this books is that it doesn't seem to be a good idea for mountain folk to leave the mountains; that's just asking for trouble.

And trouble is just what Julie and Hank get when they move down on Gap Creek so Hank can go to work at a job nearby. Julie, newly married with the secret hope that her days of hard work are done, finds herself working just as hard to keep house for her landlord and new husband. Their trials really begin at hog killing time, and things just get worse and worse as the young couple struggles to deal with fire, flood, famine and a difficult mother-in-law.

Told from the point of view of Julie, I sometimes thought the characterization of Hank and the others in the book was a little sketchy. But then I realized that Julie told her story like a mountain woman would tell it. If my grandmother had ever really sat down and told the story of her life, it would have read very much like the story of Julie and Hank. Not so much tragedy, of course, but it would have been about trouble and working and family. And Grandma would have told it like Julie did, with not so much emphasis of how and why this happened; she would have just said it happened this way.

Reading between the lines is required more with this book than with many others, but there is a subtle Appalachian realism here. Mountain people don't go in for introspection and emotion, really. Perhaps the book would have been stronger with less tragedy and more empathy between the characters, and more revelation about the development of some characters. But I think the author accomplished his purpose, and told "The Story of a Marriage".

Set in South Carolina during the late 1800s, Gap Creek is where newlyweds Julie and Hank set out to make a life. Married at a young age, they find whatever happens ... strength comes in their love for each other. Julie narrates this story, telling of sorrows and joy. Her faith in God helps her live through sadness and trials. I think it is her endurance that gives Hank hope in surviving the worst of times, from a terrible fire, a dangerous flash flood, and the loss of their firstborn. A simple, hard life says it all. I learned a lot about survival, hog dressing, burial customs, seeds, and other affairs of plain living. Reading Morgan's novel seemed like a real Foxfire experience.

Oh man, this book was really shaping up to be a four star book and then the ending. What the heck was that? If you like historical fiction and are okay with open-ended endings, this covers a less common time at the turn of the 20th century in South Carolina.