Family Music: Jessie's Mountain by Kerry Madden

In the final volume of her Maggie Valley Trilogy, Kerrie Madden takes up her account of the Weems family of Maggie Valley, North Carolina, with twelve-year-old Olivia's own story.

Livy's dad Tom, a gifted songwriter and banjoist, has suffered a brain injury in a car accident on his way to perform on the Cas Walker Show in Knoxville. Tom's speech is halting, his memory is still cloudy, and the only music he can make are the songs he hears in the form of auditory hallucinations in his head. Mama Jessie is struggling to feed her ten children with her knitting crafts, sold at the nearby Ghost Town in the Sky theme park, and her domineering mother, Grandma Horace, has decreed that since the family can't pay the mortgage on their farm, they must move to her house in Enka, known to the family as Enka-Stinka Land for its proximity to smelly paper and textile mills.

Then inexplicably Grandma Horace gives Livy her mother Jessie's journal kept the year she was twelve, and Livy suddenly sees the bright, hopeful girl her weary mama once was. With her mother's abandoned dreams in mind, Livy Two sees her singing and songwriting talents as the family's only hope to keep them in their Maggie Valley home.

Determined to market her music to radio station WSM in Nashville, Livy saves her wages from her job with the local bookmobile and plans a quick trip to Music Row on the Trailways Bus. Stowing away in the back of Matthew the Mennonite's truck, Livy finds herself trailed by her bossy ten-year-old sister Jitters, who demands to go along on pain of tattling on her big sister. Livy reluctantly pays for her sister's bus ticket and the two make the 18-hour trip, only to be turned away by her hoped-for music agent, Mr. George Flowers. In Nashville the two encounter an old con man who steals Livy's guitar and a kindly barbecue stand owner, Moses from Memphis, who advises the girls to get back home to face the music with their distraught family.

Arriving home in an ice storm, Livy realizes that instead of saving her family, she has violated their trust. Things are even harder without her guitar to inspire new songs, but despite the loss of her instrument and her job with the bookmobile, Livy is energized by her daring and by the possibilities she saw in Music City. At last an idea comes which offers a way to ease her father back into performing in public and make enough income to keep her family out of Enka-Stinka and on their Maggie Valley farm. It takes the whole family-- Gentle's singing, Louise's paintings and murals, and even Jitter's persistent management skills--to bring Livy's plan into reality, but in the end Tom Weems takes the stage to combine his banjo with Livy's guitar before a receptive audience, and Jessie's Mountain Music Notes, named for Livy's mother, becomes Maggie Valley's newest attraction.

Kerrie Madden's Jessie's Mountain (Maggie Valley Novels),, like the two previous novels, Gentle's Holler (Maggie Valley Novels) and Louisiana's Song (Maggie Valley Novels), is filled with memorable characters--mean Uncle Buddy with his pet iguana, Grandma Horace with her varied-colored glass eyes, Livy's spirited and individualistic brothers and sisters, and even Madame Cherry Hat, the landlady whose threat to foreclose on their mortgage hangs over the Weems family like a rising mountain storm. The world of the 1964 community of Maggie Valley--with its untouched hollows, river-fouling mills, and roadside tourist stands--is already fading into the homogeneous blur of the I-40 corridor between Memphis and Greensboro, but Madden's portrait of a loving family with a strong sens of their place and their past but high hopes for the future rings sure and true.

Leaving Cades Cove: Autumn Winfred Oliver Does Thing Different by Kristen O'Donnell Tubb

So there I stood, on something akin to a big, bald behind. Mighty appropriate circumstances, considering what came next.

Autumn Winifred Oliver is a girl who prides her self on "doing things different," so when her reverie on the Smoky Mountains' Gregory Bald is interrupted by the tolling of eleven tolls of the church bell down in Cades Cove, she gets scary prickles down her spine. That sound can only mean that someone eleven years old had just died--and Autumn is the only eleven year old resident of Cades Cove, Tennessee, so far as she knows. Her own death sure is something different, all right!

Down the mountain she finds the answer to her mystery. The tolling of the bells was for her Gramps, John Tipton, who, being pronounced dead, suddenly began to wheeze and breathe, stopping the bell ringer in mid-toll and returning abruptly to his usual cranky, headstrong ways. Suddenly her mama uses her father's near-death experience as reason to move into his generations-old log cabin and look after him. This is not necessarily good news for Autumn, who has been looking forward to a move to the big city of Knoxville, where her Pops is working. It's a decision which Autumn intuits is just her mother's way of staying out of the big city and inside the security of the Cove and her family circle.

But that safe haven is fast changing. It's 1934, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is taking shape under the guidance of John D. Rockefeller and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Promised that the park would stay clear of Cade's Cove, Gramps is full of big plans to make money off the hoped-for tourists and stays on the go convincing his neighbors to approve the takeover. His enthusiasm keeps Autumn and her fifteen-year-old sister Katie hopping as they transform their ramshackle barn into a tourist trap of a hotel, a job which is far too dirty and boring for Autumn's taste. To her mind, Gramps is way too happy to have the girls around to do his chores. Assigned to keep his flock of geese from cleaning out the garden one morning, Autumn is rankled that her planned day of fishing is interrupted and takes matters into hand her own way.

"I managed to snag every single goose out there, despite a lot of flapping and honking and stinking. And then came the hard part. I pried open their horrible beaks, snipped of a bit of twig, and propped open each goose's mouth like a pup tent.

Boy, what a sight! Those stinking geese couldn't close their mouths, let alone do so around a juicy tomato plant. Problem solved."

Autumn, for sure, is a girl who does things different, and she manages to find herself some adventure when a flash flood washes the local undertaker's privy, chicken coop and chickens, and a brand-new coffin down Abrams Creek. Autumn and her sidekick Cody climb aboard to pioneer the first white-water coffin trip nearly all the way downstream to Townsend.

Rescued after a cold, damp night in the woods by some CCC workers, from them Autumn learns some surprising and saddening facts: the Cove is indeed to be included into the national park and her own family's house is already being demolished in the drive to return the Cove to its pioneer appearance. Convincing her grandfather and mother that they have been misled takes a bit of trickery on her part, but her family finally realizes that their old way of life is on its way out. Autumn is consoled by her Pops, whose sawmill job will also end when the park closes down the lumber companies. Pops describes the terrible fate of the hills denuded of their forests, their creeks fouled, by the lumber companies which are racing against time to cut as many trees as they can before the park service shuts them down.

"So, if we do have to sell out to the park--which it sure sounds like we do--well, then, we might lose a few buildings here and there. But I'd say we all agree that's better than stripping bare our land. Let's thank heaven our land was spared the saw."

In the end, with her Gramps really dead this time, the Park Service claims his cabin, fated to become the "Tipton Cabin" exhibit in the Cove, and the family belatedly make their move to Knoxville, where, with all those sidewalks, Autumn at least looks forward to being the roller skating champion of East Tennessee.

Despite the sad story of the diaspora of the Cades Cove community, Kristen O'Donnell Tubb's Autumn Winifred Oliver Does Things Different is a joyous and humorous story of a resilient and spunky girl who finds a way to put her mark on everything she does. Tubbs works a lot of historical information about the displaced mountain communities of the Smokies into her narrative, admittedly compressing some events for dramatic effect. Although a bit more editing could have winnowed out some speech anachronisms (for example, Autumn speaks of being "grounded" for her mischief) in the text, Tubbs' characterizations are strong and memorable, putting human voices and faces to those shadowy "pioneers" of the Smokies National Park.

Road to Somewhere: Greetings from Nowhere by Barbara O'Connor

FOR SALE, she wrote, and felt a jab at her heart.

Sleepy Time Motel. Shawnee Gap, North Carolina.

Another jab.

Ten lovely rooms with mountain view. Swimming pool. Tomato garden.

Jab, jab.

For sale by owners, Harold and Agnes Duncan.

Then she felt a jab that nearly knocked her over. Her hand trembled so much that she could hardly keep the pen on the paper as she scratched out Harold's name.

With her husband of many years dead and bills piling up in the junk drawer, not a customer for three months and no one to talk to but her one-eyed cat Ugly, Aggie has no choice but to sell her small motel just over the ridge from I-40, where tourists fill the shiny new chain motels on their way to the Smokies. But that one little ad changes more than just Aggie Duncan's life.

Fate suddenly brings customers to Aggie's door, three family groups, each with a child and each with a ghost of someone lost in their hearts. First comes Willow and her dad Frank Dover to see about buying the motel. Willow's mother Dorothy has left the family, gone to make a new life in Savannah with her sister, and her dad is ready to try a new life in Shawnee Gap. Willow, however, still grieves the loss of her mother and has just watched her little brick house, her best friend, and the rest of her life's history disappear behind her through the rear window of her dad's truck. She's heard nothing from her mom since she left, not even a postcard, and her dad goes silent when she tries to talk about her loss.

Cheery Loretta and her proud adoptive parents arrive also, seeing in the down-at-the-heels motel a quiet, homey place to stay for their vacation in the mountains. In a small package from a stranger, Loretta has just received a box of trinkets, all that was left behind by her just-deceased birth mother. Inside with a photograph of a little girl who looks like Loretta were a rhinestone poodle pin, an old watch, a folding fan, and a jingly bracelet with souvenir charms--the Statue of Liberty, a cowboy hat, a cactus, and a Smoky Mountain bear. Loretta becomes convinced that the charms represent places her mother had visited, and her good-natured, loving parents have promised to take her on a pilgrimage to every one represented on the bracelet, beginning with the Smokies.

Then there's Kirby, on his way to a last-chance reform school, the Smoky Mountains Boys Academy, with his perpetually angry mother, made even more angry by the breakdown of their rusty old car a couple of miles down the winding two-lane road. Kirby's personal ghost is the good son and brother he's never been, the "fine young man" that Aggie sees in his clumsy efforts to entertain the younger girls with his yo-yo tricks and help her fix up the motel for a promised busload of tourists from Atlanta.

Sadly Aggie begins to pack up her few keepsakes--Harold's sweater, her wedding plate and Harold's mother's teacup--but as painful as the dreaded leave taking is, she is drawn to the three children staying at the Sleepytime Motel. Although Aggie has little she treasures beyond her battle-scarred cat and Harold's old slippers, she's always favored kids, and from her generous heart the three get what they need to make them complete. In turn each manages to give back to Aggie exactly what she has needed as well.

A gently told tale of ordinary people who surprisingly have all they need to make each other whole, Barbara O'Connor's Greetings from Nowhere (Frances Foster Books) gets to that genuine happy ending that does not surprise but deeply satisfies the reader. As Christian Science Monitor's reviewer puts it, "Readers will come to realize that everyone has something worth paying attention to, if you dig deep enough." This one is a remarkable novel, hard to put down, with beautifully drawn and quite unforgettable characters.