This book alone managed convince me to ignore Oprah's Book Club. The situation was interesting enough but I decided that Robert Morgan should not try to write from a woman's perspective. In my opinion he got it all wrong. Not worth recommending and i can't figure out why so many people loved it.

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.

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.

I hated this book for so many reasons! Here are the top five.

1. I don't buy Robert Morgan writing as a female. It just doesn't wash.

2. The sex scenes are beyond unbelievable - they read like some weird hill-billy acid trip synthesia. It's very distracting.

3. I don't buy that such a strong female character would tolerate such an abusive, whiny husband. My tough ol' granny would have shot him and thrown his ass in the creek.

4. On a related note, I hated Hank and was waiting for him to die. I was disappointed when he didn't.

5. The book is written in the first person, and the charcter's grammar wasn't consistant. It slipped between normal and dialect for no apparent reason and pulled me right out of the story.

This book was not so bad but it wasn't as intriguing to me as the other books I read. I don't like to read about any sort of books containing rural background.
I really enjoyed how Julie, the main character just gets things done whether she wants to or not. I, on the other hand, cannot be like her because at home when I'm assigned to do chores, I do them when I'm done with my homework or if I really don't like doing it, I don't get it done at all.
Julie is a hard working woman who, had seen her father and little brother die before her eyes. They say "she works hard like a man". In the story she had to chop up the pig into pieces and have them as dinner. In my mind, I was completely disgusted when it came to that part. If I were Julie, I dont' think I can last 1 minute of chopping up that pig.
So, overall, I think this book was okay, not good but not bad. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys learning about family building and... pig chopping.. :)

I picked this up and it immediately caught my attention. I read a little bit at night before bed over a couple of nights and then took it to work today where I sat and finished it in a couple of hours. I know a lot of people did not like the way it was written but I had no problem overlooking the "ignorant" speech of the characters. They were what they were. The other complaint that some of my friends had was that the title would seem to indicate it covered the whole marriage or at least a good part of it. Instead, it was just a glimpse into the early part (like about the first year or so) of a marriage. It was about the beginning and the laying of the foundation of a marriage I would say. The story was touching and sad and made me infinitely grateful to live in a time where life is easier. The way uneducated and poor people lived was hard and life was an uncertain for the young and old alike. This book gave me a tiny peek into the life of a girl who had to grow up too fast and take on responsibilities in order for her family to survive. Marriage provided no relief and she had to work even harder in order to make a life with her husband. She had this deep well of inner strength that only grew stronger as each trial came her way. I found myself wanting the Julie and Hank to make it,but at the same time, I wanted to smack Hand and make him man up. They were both so young and so ignorant about things. All that being said, this was a great book and was well worth the time.

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".

I loved, loved, loved this book. One of my favorite characters in a long time. Desperately sad, it tells the story of a young girl in appalachia after the civil war. Much of her story is unbelivably tragic - hunger, death, and unending struggle. Yet, the writing is so clean, beautiful and rich that the story sings, and is surprisingly uplifting. The central character Julie Harmon is a simple woman - uneducated, unquestioning. She is the person that her entire family leans on to run the farm when her father takes ill, and later, the center of her family when she marries. She has an amazing spirit - full of faith, and with an enduring power and will to survive, and to love, despite amazing challenges and hardship. She takes joy in the quiet of nature, the smell of chestnuts, and the taste of fresh ham, even when they are hungry, and she has only 32 cents left in the world.

I tend to enjoy living fiction books, so there was a lot I enjoyed about this book. The reason I rated it with 3 stars is there were a few parts I had to skip over because of explicit content, which I never read. The ending is also very abrupt and, in my opinion, unsatisfying. It's unfortunate, because this had the makings of a really great read, but these 2 issues really affected the outcome.

“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.

If the purpose of the story was to leave you feeling cold, miserable and wanting a bath then it achieved its aim. Julie and Hank were so mismatched and don’t get me started on those weird sex scenes, god knows where Robert Morgan went to research those. It might have scraped 3 stars if it weren’t for the graphic butchering descriptions

Just OK. There is a sequel but I have little desire to continue this storyline. Set in the early 1900's, it tells the story of Julie, our protagonist, and her struggles eeking out a life in the rural Carolinas. She marries young, to a relatively immature, quick to anger young man. Nothing good can come of that, but she is an amazingly strong character and we are left at the end of the book to believe he finally shapes up and becomes worthy of his marriage. Overall a little depressing, but I believe life during the turn of the 20th century was not a bowl of cherries and the author did a good job depicting that.