This gentle book tells the story of Julie, as she navigates the death of her brother and father and the first year or so of her marriage to Hank, lived in the valley of Gap Creek, South Carolina as the 19th century comes to a close. Julie and Hank are young and poor. They struggle and grow together through challenging events. The story is told by Julie, who begins the book as a physically strong youth whose attitude is that, if it needs to be done, you just get on with it. The tone feels authentic and I felt like I struggled with poor Julie as she tries to figure out her place in the world. I loved the way color was used in the novel to describe emotional events. I also loved reading an honest narrator.

I enjoyed reading this story. Life in the Appalachian mountains for the very poor at the turn of the century (1899 0 1900) is almost unimaginable. This is a story about a young couple in the first year of their marriage. Their struggle to survive and make it to the next day is quite vividly told. While I find the story depressing, I couldn't stop reading it either..

'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.

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.

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).

Julie Harmon is an inspiring, likable character who keeps going even while enduring one tragedy after another. Morgan has said that he struggled to find her voice, but I think it's clear that he did find it because she is realistic and memorable. Morgan's writing is beautiful and at times poetic, which is not surprising given his background as a poet. The scene with Julie, her father, and brother in the woods at night is amazingly well done, especially Julie's realization that the natural world can be strikingly beautiful even as something awful is happening. The character of Hank is interesting and I got a pretty good sense of him, but I wish we had understood a bit more of his true personality and where he was coming from. The scenes with his mother give us some insight, but more might have been helpful. While the religious parts in the second half of the book didn't bother me at all, Julie's interest in religion seemed to come out of nowhere to some extent, even though it's maybe hinted at in the beginning of the book. There are a lot of lengthy descriptions of Julie's hard work throughout the book. Although at times they can start to get tedious and there's a "well-researched" feel to them, they do help paint the picture of just how hard working and tough she was. In any event, despite some minor issues, I loved Morgan's descriptions and imagery and I came away really impressed with this book.

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

depressing AF, and Julie could have done better than marrying the first man that looked at her. ugh.

I went to Oprah's book club to find some new reads and happened on Morgan. I was attracted to this because it takes place in the Appalachians.

His writing is very poetical and descriptive, with an almost musical lilt to some of his writing. Add to that the country way of speaking that lends a charm of it's own.

"The ground was deep in fresh-fell leaves, and leaves sparkled like they was waxed and oiled. I kicked up a cloud of leaves. I kicked up a fog of new-fell leaves. I kicked away the leaves in front of me like deep fresh snow. Leaves swarmed around my head, clicking as they touched. I waved my arms and swatted them away. I danced with the leaves and made them swirl faster. I laughed out loud and laughed at the top of my voice. I caught leaves in my apron and pitched them away."

Julie is such a strong character, and she helped me feel how hard it was to live and survive back not too long ago. There was lots of work that had to be done, like it or not. And Julie just kept doing the next thing, even when it seemed impossible.

There's a strength in all of us that we'll never realize til we're pushed to our limit and made to pull out every bit of grit and gumption. It's very empowering to get to that point and then through it. It builds you up for the next hard thing you'll have to face.

This book takes you on the journey with Julie.

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.

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.

I feel like this was a Barnes and Noble "Free Friday" book but I'm not 100% sure.. Either way, I hope I didn't spend money on it. This was one of the most depressing things I've read in quite some time.. a book of one hardship after another, after another.. It took me 2 months to get through it! Granted, I'm busy.. but not THAT busy. OY. I am that person that makes myself finish books, so there you have it 0 that is the ONLY reason I stuck with it. The VERY end had a redeeming quality, and I guess finally provided some closure for all the depressing themes.. but boy, you really have to tough it out to get to that point.
2 stars because I liked the author's use of dialect and characterization. That's it.