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NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS George EUa Lyon. With a Hammer for My Heart. New York: DK Publishing, 1997. 213 pages. $21.95 With a HammerforMy Heartis George EUa Lyon's first adult novel. But her broad experience as a poet and as a writer ofnovels for young readers is apparent not only in her craft but in her consistently engaging characters and plot. This story is set in Cardin, a small town turned commerce strip somewhere in Eastern Kentucky. It is in no way remarkable; or, better, it is far too real to be remarkable. As such, it forms the fitting backdrop for a cast ofcharacters whom many readers will seem to recognize from high school yearbooks and summer reunions, if not from community gossip or their own family stories. At the center ofthe tale is a relationship between an apparently typical fifteen-year-old girl, Lawanda Ingle, and the town misfit, World War II veteran Amos Garland. Few townspeople can believe that what they share is as good—and as pure—as it is; we readers have trouble believing it ourselves. So there are many levels and kinds oftension, and there is nothing cheap in the grace that resolves it. Determined to make the money necessary to trade life in Cardin for a chance at college, Lawanda Ingle takes up door-to-door magazine sales. Against her father's advice, she soon calls upon the eccentric Garland. He had returned from World War II some thirtyfive years before; but, more accurately, he never came home. Memories of the comrades he could not save, their sufferings and their deaths, keep returning in graphic flashbacks, visions that cause violent and irrational behaviors. Understandably, his wife and children left soon after his return, but not soon enough to escape his rage. Thirty years after their departure, Amos—like his biblical namesake—lives outside and above the town, a position from which his angry brilliance can observe and criticize. Equally suggestive, he lives not in one retired school bus, but in two. In "First Bus," as Lawanda ecclesiastically calls it, are arranged hundreds of books and maps. In those surroundings, Amos is a philosopher and a sage; he reads and studies in that "clean, well lighted place," and occasionally entertains the handful of townspeople wise enough themselves to sense the wisdom behind his weirdness. But in "Second Bus," where he drinks and sleeps and dreams, he remains in the dissipation and disorder of a soldier who never came home. 57 The friendship of Lawanda and Garland is tested when vandals break into his bus and start a fire. Local authorities put it out quickly, but when they do they happen upon Garland's journal, the notebook where he unloads the fear and anger carried home from the war. Unfortunately, too, he has chronicled on those pages his growing affection for Lawanda, who has replaced the children he drove away. The wild, delusional nature of his writing is interpreted by the overzealous, underqualified town policeman, Gait, as implying an illegal sexual union. By unlucky coincidence , the discovery occurs while Garland is already confined to the town jail, incarcerated for the relatively innocent misdemeanor of urinating behind a handy billboard. Because of the notebook, Gait holds him there, hoping that Lawanda's father will be able to extract from her some sordid confession. Of course there is none to make, but Howard Ingle is sufficiently enraged to seek revenge. Realizing her friend's desperate situation, Lawanda, guided by her faith-healing Mamaw, makes a desperate search for Garland's daughter, Nancy Catherine, the only person she believes may have the resources and the will to come to the old man's aid. Lawanda discovers herrunning a florist shop in Lexington, then accompanies her back to Cardin. There various kinds of healing can begin, but at a price. In Lyon's world, there are no indulgences for sale: fate has demanded the sacrifice of one "daughter" for the other. We follow Lawanda's suffering, her naivete and her sophistication, closely because hers is the mind in which Lyon allows us to travel most thoroughly. Hers is not our only contact, however, because the point...

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