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”Dance a little closer to me, dance a little closer now
Dance a little closer tonight
Dance a little closer to me, hey it's closing time
And love's on sale tonight at this five and dime

“Rita was sixteen years, hazel eyes and chestnut hair
She really made the Woolworth counter shine
Eddie was a sweet romancer, and a darn good dancer
And they'd waltz the aisles of the five and dime...��
-- Love at the Five and Dime, Kathy Mattea, Songwriters: Nanci Griffith

”Clay knew that the mountains looked purple under that big, moving sky, but they didn’t look still at all to him. They seemed to be breathing—rising so slowly, so carefully, that no one noticed but him. He watched them, concentrating the way he did when he was convinced a shadow had moved across his bedroom wall. It seemed to Clay that they rose and fell with a single pulse, as if the whole mountain chain was connected.��

Clay Sizemore is a coal miner, living on a mountain in Tennessee that has housed his family for generations. His family are simple people with simple needs, and it seemed when I first began this story that it could have been in the 1920s or earlier, or any time, really, if it weren’t for the references
to the 1990s music Clay likes to listen to.

He was a young child when his mother died, and his family is tightly bound together. His memories of that are dim, but he remembers the last thing he heard her say.

’She pressed her face to the window, leaning her forehead against the cold glass.�� I ain’t never seen it so quiet on this mountain,�� she said.”��

His family is everything to him, and when he meets Alma Asher, a fiddler, it isn’t long before he realizes that he wants to make her a part of his family, as well.

All these characters, who are indeed characters, likable, lovable, sweet, and some violent, unlikeable ones, but they are never uninteresting. In this, his debut, House’s writing shows the promise that I found in his latest, Southernmost. I’m looking forward to reading his ”A Parchment of Leaves very soon.