Farlanburg Stories (review)

away little naked gardens on Clover Fork, pigs and chickens on Martins Fork, and a whole front porch on Poor Fork." Stephen Gammell s unusual splattered and colorful illustrations portray these events and many others in lovely, realistic detail that demands careful viewing —so careful that your child may urge you to "turn the page" before you've soaked it all in, and you'll have to sneak a second and third look later. Children will love the characters in this story; adults will appreciate the skill with which they are rendered. Floods are a harsh reality in many mountain communities, yet Lyon makes the catastrophe more benign by creating a warmth of community and family, a coming together of people and spirit in the face of natural disaster and property loss. "It'll come a tide," says Grandma when the rains begin. And afterwards, when asked for advice, she replies, "If it was me I'd make friends with a shovel." Commonsense, wise advice. -Kathy Lyday-Lee Koger, Lisa. Farlanburg Stories. New York: WW Norton & Co., 1990. Cloth, 234 pages. $17.95. Farlanburg Stories, West Virginia native Lisa Roger's first book, brings some much deserved national attention to a major new voice, to a writer who twice won the Appalachian Writers Association 's fiction competition and has published in such magazines as Seventeen , The American Voice, and Ploughshares . Koger, who lived in Monticello, Kentucky , before going to the University of Iowa, supported by a grant from the Kentucky Women's Foundation, stirs inevitable comparisons to Bobbie Ann Mason and Lee Smith, but has her own distinctive way of writing about smalltown Appalachia. Her precise style, sly humor, and unique vision set Lisa Koger apart, imprint a distinctive mastery, and confirm the belief that many of us have had for a long time that she belongs in the front ranks of emerging authors. The book's final two stories are my personal favorites. "Baby Luv" (which won the 1987 AWA fiction award) starts out: "My sister Nedra has a dead baby. I'm eleven, and I'm alive; it doesn't seem fair. I sit in the backseat of Dewdie's Pontiac convertible and watch the sunlight slice like a golden knife through the roof of the car.' And it gets better. "Structural Changes," the final story and the most powerful in the collection, steps inside Eva Duncan's dream: "In the darkness behind her lids, she saw a baby. It crawled around for a while, then stopped and reached for her, drooling . She was about to pick it up when she noticed more babies crawling from under her house. Instead of being fat and pink, they were pale and hairless as new pigs, and each one had a gold ring in its ear." Quite, almost timid Lisa Koger is a powerful writer. Farlanburg Stories, praised by Denise Giardina, Lee Smith, and Anne Rivers Siddon, deserves the plaudits. -Garry Barker Tale of the Tennessee Woods a climbing a crag a misstepping an ankle, paining eyes stung by sweat and then the light over the mountain of the rising moon excellently bright -Paul Ramsey 71 ...