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Set in present day West Virginia, Ann Pancake's debut novel,Strange As This Weather Has Been, tells the story of a coal mining family--a couple and their four children--living through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is left of their mountain life. As the mine turns the mountains to slag and wastewater, workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters. Strange As This Weather Has Been follows several members of the family, with a particular focus on fifteen-year-old Bant and her mother, Lace. Working at a "scab" motel, Bant becomes involved with a young miner while her mother contemplates joining the fight against the mining companies. As domestic conflicts escalate at home, the children are pushed more and more outside among junk from the floods and felled trees in the hollows--the only nature they have ever known. But Bant has other memories and is as curious and strong-willed as her mother, and ultimately comes to discover the very real threat of destruction that looms as much in the landscape as it does at home.… (more)
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At the open of the novel, Lace—now unhappily married to Jimmy Make and mother to four of his children—finds her beloved mountains threatened by strip mining operations that have literally destroyed an entire mountaintop and caused a flash flood that killed several of her neighbors and poisoned the waters. With Jimmy unable to work due to injury and Lace unable to supplement their income by collecting plants off the now-corrupted mountainsides, the family faces not only crushing poverty but the constant threat of further floods, poisonous water, and worse.
Beautifully written in the slow, almost elegiac rhythms of the region, “Strange as This Weather Has Been” is a moving meditation on humanity’s relationship with nature and humanity’s peculiar talent to destroy that which it should most cherish. Seen through the eyes of Lace and her children, the strip-mining of Appalachia becomes not just an environmental disaster, but an overwhelmingly personal human tragedy.