Disclaimer - I listened to this book on CDs and the narrator was awful. Over and over she sounded like she honestly was a 1st grader learning how to read. Short. Choppy. Words. Built. Into. Sentences. She said. Hank said. I said. Over and over. It was a dreadful audio and I will never listen to another read by her. Now on to the book - which I actually have a paperback copy of that I’m promptly putting in recycling bin because I can’t in good conscience donate it for anyone else to drag through. Mansplaining circa 1890. Julie was not fleshed out beyond being poor, poorly educated, and hard working. Hank turns from sweet farm boy to abusive and awful seemingly overnight. Yet the tale goes on for Julie hoping for a better day and completely glossing over every episode of Hanks abusive behavior. Let’s just stop for a moment and ask any woman— during birth did you feel a “pleasure of stretching...pleasure so intense you couldn’t name it”? Yeah. That’s a direct quote from this nonsense. Anyhow. I’m aghast Oprah picked it for her book club and sorry I wasted hours listening to it. Hard pass on this one. Read anything by Charles Frazier instead.

'It's for a challenge.' momma said.
'It's an Oprah recommendation too.' poppa said
'It's a classic.' Hank said.
'And it's short.' I said.
'It's a southern tale.' Hank said.
'It has sentences like "We washed the floor until the planks was raw".' momma said.
'But the conversations are extremely annoying.' poppa said.
'Oprah and I don't like the same books.' I said.
'You'll be glad when it's over.' Hank said.
'The story are slightly okay, but the accent and writing makes me dislike reading it.' I said.
'That's gonna be a low rating then.' Poppa said.
'No more than two stars.' momma said.
'Indeed so.' I said.

And with that you've basically read the entire book. I've read another book this year with similar conversations. Had this story been longer I would not have finished it for the '....said' dialogues.

This is a difficult book for me to review. It is not one I would recommend for everyone. It takes a certain appreciation for all things literary to enjoy this book; as it is certainly not for the faint of heart. The themes are depressing, even over-the-top sometimes, but rather than make one sad, it tends to elicit an appreciation for the ease and conveniences of our post-modern existence. More than anything, it evokes an empathy for the main character. It is not so much about the plot, but about the writing style for me. It is definitely associated with the realism of post-Civil War literature. The characters have difficult lives, incredible hardships, and almost infuriating personality traits, yet there are redemptive qualities as well as moments of sheer bliss derived solely from nature. The elements of naturalism are reminiscent of romanticism in that the only time Julie is at peace or finds comfort is when she is either alone or in nature.

The subtitle is deceiving, because I did not agree it was the story of a marriage, but rather a young woman's tale. The story opens before her marriage, and truthfully,her marriage is just another unfortunate event in her life that leads to further hardships. I did enjoy Morgan's writing style, and plan to read some of his other works for the sake of comparison.

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.

This is a story of a newly married couple who set out to make a home for themselves in the mountains of Appalachia. After reading this book I don't think I can ever complain again about having too much work to do. What the young woman of the story had to do daily just to survive, put me in my place.

I asked for a really sad book to read and someone recommended this.

It was "sad", but it wasn't my kind of sad. I love books that wrap me up in the characters so that when something tragic happens to them, I feel it too. This book was just sad because life was hard for the characters and they experienced a lot of tough breaks. But I didn't feel anything for the characters... they were pretty flat. And the writing was pretty boring, often taking three pages to describe skinning a hog or something equally high on the "I didn't need to know that" scale.

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.

I really enjoyed this book and the main character, Julie. She is amazing! I can understand why some people thought this book was depressing---she goes through so much hardship. Personally, I was inspired. It helped me appreciate my modern conveniences and ease of life.
I was especially impressed with Julie's strength---both physical and mental---and wisdom for her age. She was very insightful in knowing how to maintain peace in her home despite troubles. What acceptance, too! I felt humbled in realizing how much I have to be thankful for and what I can personally do to improve myself. I wanted to throttle Hank so many times---my husband is a saint by comparison. I mean, could Hank just have once put aside his pride and told Julie he appreciated her???
I didn't want this book to end. It was written in 1999 so I am pessimistic about expecting a sequel. I wish I could know what happened to them. It felt like it ended just as a new chapter in their lives began! Please Mr. Morgan, can we have some more?

make it a 3.5

This book was different in that most of it was sad. I did enjoy reading about the historical part of it and it was very descriptive.

This story is plodding, unforgiving and - after the abrupt ending - I would add, unfinished. But, I was interested and almost engrossed the entire time because I could understand and relate to the female protagonist so well. She learns early on in life that a woman's work is never done and, she decides, is best done quickly and without complaint. She absorbs the repeated indignities of poor, mountain life with grace and grit - including a childbirth scene that I loved and where she describes her personal philosophy of life, "There was no way I could get out of it. There was no way I wanted to get out of it. This is my work, I thought. This is the work only I can do. This is work meant for me from the beginning of time. And this is work leading through me in an endless chain of people all the way to the end of time. Other women have done their work down the course of the years, and now it's my turn. There's nothing to do but take hold of the pain and wrestle with it" (p. 284). I love her pragmatic approach to life and forgiveness of others - even an obnoxious mother-in-law.

Good story, just didn’t like the ending.