The main thing about this was that there wasn’t any emotional attachment to the characters. If I’m going to like a book, I have to care what happens to the people in it, and that just didn’t happen. People in a book need distinct traits: recurring personality points, habits, a sense of humor (or lack of one), a certain “voice” that makes them stand out, and the people in this had very little appeal to make me want to find out what happened to them. It didn’t help that there were probably too many of them, and too many points of view to allow time to form some sort of bond with them.

There were huge gaps where important developments were skipped, like what happened between Myrthen and her parents after her sister died (not a spoiler if you read the summary)? Obviously it was significant due to the interaction between them as she got older, especially with her mother, but there were no scenes included that developed the relationship to the snapping point that it eventually reached. Another character had barely been introduced before the author had a traumatic event happening to her, before there was any reason to care what happened to her. And I didn’t think that this particular event was done sensitively at all. Instead of being revealed slowly or hinted at, it was thrown in my face with virtually every detail described, which utterly destroyed the emotional impact as it came off as more trashy than sad or disturbing.

Interaction between characters often wasn’t believable, like when a woman finds out that someone is virtually stalking her son, and instead of bringing it up to her husband to keep the son away from the stalker, apparently says nothing. Convenient opportunity for Stalker to attack. And when the girl with the trauma tries to tell her friend about it, the friend actually tells her to keep it to herself because hearing about it might upset people. This friend was supposed to be the “wise older woman” of the book, but shuts down someone who tries to talk about something that she was clearly extremely distraught over. I could not believe the stupidity.

The writing style was pretty flat, or else over-the-top. The language didn’t create an atmosphere that made me feel I was in a West Virginian coal-mining town, and the dialogue seemed unnatural at times, like one character saying about trying to forget a bad memory that he “let the weight of time hold it down deep.” Who talks like that?! Nobody, least of all a coal miner with no education beyond high school. Writers need to worry less about being poignantly descriptive when it comes to how their characters speak, and more about making them come off realistically. Perhaps more research should have been done on the area, like visiting or living there, to build a believable setting and its inhabitants.

I gave it two stars instead of one for the middle, where some interesting things happened between women and the husbands they were coerced or guilted into marrying, and characters finally got some of the development and complexity they deserved. It tapered off after that, and went back to being detached and pretentiously wordy.

TLDR- Another supposedly-compelling and atmospheric novel, with not much more than a pretty cover.