Lick Creek: A Novel

By Brad Kessler

Book Overview

Set in the remote mining country of West Virginia in the late twenties, "Lick Creek" is the compelling story of a fiery young woman, Emily Jenkins, and what happens when progress -- and tragedy -- comes to her family's farm. Brad Kessler has a generous and keen eye for natural landscape and its power in human life. In his profound, dramatic first novel, he explores the complex intersections of faith, tradition, and innovation. After the coal mine deaths of her father, brother, and the first man she loved, Emily struggles to support herself and her mother. When construction begins on the power lines, she blames the intruders for everything that has gone awry -- for her mother's increasing withdrawal from life and for lives already lost. Then, an electrical worker is struck by lightning. Brought to their farmhouse unconscious and badly injured, Joseph is taken in by Emily's mother, and Emily is seduced by the mystery of his past, his immigration from Russia, his mother's deportations, and the world of immigrants forced to flee persecution in their homelands. Moving from romance to high drama, Kessler illuminates the role of electricity in the transformation of rural life and the particular electricity between two vastly different people whose worlds and passions collide. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743201604
• ISBN13: 9780743201605
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Liked this book immensely!!

I was delighted by the language, the story, the characters, especially Emily, the female lead. I liked the atmosphere and the beautiful descriptions of the mountains. I would recommend this book to anyone who cares about good writing and a good story. Once I got passed the first 50 pages, I couldn't put it down.

Lick Creek

How do you smell? might be a subtitle for this poetically tactile first novel by the grandson of a main character, not a man personally related to the wonderfully real and tragically human Appalachian maid Emily Jenkins, whose story this is. Her short life moves from one great loss to another, but she endures and does not exhibit, rather embodies, the fierce loyalty and spiritual beauty so much a part of her people. Like...

The Right Paddle and in the Flow

I enjoyed this literary novel in spite of the subject not being anything that I've ever invested time or energy in before. The prose quality was the first thing that struck me. It is an extremely well written book, particularly the expository chapters which boast prose so lyrical it occasionally borders on poetry. However, it would damn the core story with faint praise to label this work just a 'well crafted' first novel...

Electrifying!

Lick Creek is a rich mixture of love, electricity and life poetically told by one practiced in the art of alchemy. The story is woven with such vivid and etherial description I finished the novel feeling as though I had just watched it on the sliver screen. Although comparisons are never quite fair, Kessler's style brings to mind shades of Robert Penn Warren, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ontaatje and Alan Lightman. His descriptive...

richly imagined, compelling story

Lick Creek is the best book I've read in a long time. The author has created a fully drawn world, where sights, sounds, smells and feelings are beautifully evoked. The characters are absolutely real, vividly portrayed, and the reader can't help but be drawn in. I was delighted all the way through this book.