The Unquiet Earth

May 4, 1992
Giardina's powerful sequel to the highly praised Storming Heaven again focuses on Blackberry Creek, a West Virginia coal-mining town targeted for union-busting by coal companies and the federal government. In a timeframe reaching from 1930 to the present, Giardina dramatizes the community's--and individual characters'--short-lived victories, overwhelming frustrations and ultimate devastation. Rebels kept in check with threats of violence, impoverished children whose pride is damaged by outsiders' self-satisfied displays of charity, and men who have survived mine-shaft collapses only to succumb to black lung disease populate these pages; all must watch as their cherished sites are destroyed by machines that strip the land. Central to the novel is the secret, star-crossed love affair of cousins Dillon Freedman, a fierce union activist, and Rachel Honaker, a practical woman who holds an establishment job as a nurse. Their emotional bond is strained by conflicting politics, while their tragic situation is magnified by Rachel's daughter Jackie, who is unaware that Dillon may be her father and ashamed of her ``hillbilly'' roots. Narrated in four primary and three lesser voices, this compelling saga starkly portrays the mining families' symbiotic, spiritual relationship with nature and their helplessness in dealing with the ruthless men who control their lives.

April 15, 1992
This sequel to Storming Heaven ( LJ 7/87) follows the next generation of West Virginia coal miners from the Depression into the 1990s. Union organizer Dillon Freeman fights against the increasingly sophisticated tactics of the coal company while he struggles with his feelings for his cousin Rachel Honaker. She crosses over into "enemy territory" when she becomes entangled with company men, but continues to help her family and friends as a county public health nurse. Rachel's daughter Jackie learns of a world beyond Blackberry Creek when she meets Tom, a priest from the Peace Corps, who seeks to organize a food co-op and later works for social justice in Honduras. Giardina continues to create believable characters and a vivid landscape of pain as the coal mining community disintegrates over time. Highly recommended.-- Heather Blenkinsopp, Mercy Coll. Lib., Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 1992
Convention-bound public-health nurse Rachel Honaker notes, "It is a belief we have, as strong as any religion, that home can be preserved forever and life made everlasting if we only stay put." Rachel's commitment to the farms and mining camps of the rock-ribbed Kentucky-West Virginia border is as strong as the attachment to home of the narrators of Giardina's widely praised "Storming Heaven" (who were Rachel's Aunt Carrie; Rondal Lloyd, the union organizer who fathered Carrie's son, Dillon; and Mrs. Angelelli, driven mad when a single mine explosion kills all her sons) or the devotion to this hardscrabble mountain country of "The Unquiet Earth"'s other primary narrators (Rachel's cousin-lover Dillon and their daughter, Jackie). The earlier novel focused on the violent 1921 Annadel miners' strike; this effort stands on its own as a tale of the people of Jenkinjones and Felco and Number Thirteen and Winco and Justice mines from the 1930s to the 1990s, through World War II and desegregation, the War on Poverty and Vietnam, to strip-mining and union-busting. "The Unquiet Earth" offers headstrong characters, a powerful sense of place, a communitarian political vision, and a riveting, reality-based plot. An important contemporary historical novel. ((Reviewed May 1, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)