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Amazon Sales Rank: 113878
Publication Date: 2006-09-01
Publisher: Cumberland House Publishing
ISBN: 1581825706
Type: Hardcover
Number Of Pages: 320
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In 1963 rural Georgia, with the Vietnam War cranking up, pregnant seventeen-year-old Adie Jenkins discovers the diary of pregnant seventeen-year-old Tempe Jordan, a slave girl, begun as the Civil War was winding down. Adie is haunted by the memory of her dead sister; Tempe is overcome with grief over the sale of her three children sired by her master.
Adie—married to Buck, her baby's skirt-chasing father—is unprepared for marriage and motherhood. She spends her days with her new baby, Grace Annie. Buck spends his with the conniving daughter of the man he works for. Adie welcomes the friendship of midwife Willa Mae Satterfield. Having grown close to her after Grace Annie's birth, Adie confides that her baby sister, Annie, survived choking on a jelly bean only to drown in Cold Rock River a few months later. Willa Mae replies, "My two little chillins Georgia and Calvin drowns in that river, too." What she won't say is how and why.
Adie takes refuge in Tempe's journal. It tells an amazing tale, but the further she reads, the more questions the diary raises in her mind. After "the freedom" comes, Tempe sets out to find her lost children and meets Tom Barber, another freed slave. Tom and Tempe marry and have one daughter, Heart. When Tom is killed in a drunken brawl, Tempe takes Heart and settles on a small patch of land in North Georgia.
There, Heart blossoms, eventually marrying and giving birth to Georgia and Calvin. Adie is filled with questions: Could Willa Mae be Heart? How—and why—did the children die? And is it possible that the man who now owns the house in which she lives is Willa Mae's grandson?
As Cold Rock River rushes to its surprising, shocking ending, questions of family, race, love, loss, and longing are loosed from the mysterious secrets that have been kept for too long. And the depth of the connection between the two women united by place and separated by race—and a century—is revealed.
Average Rating: 
Review: 2008-11-21
Cold Rock River Smooths the Rough Edges
J.L. Miles' Cold Rock River: A Novel flows in and out of the past and present of Adie Thacker's life and occasionally transports the reader into the thicket of plantations and slavery near the time of the Civil War. The reader travels along the current of Cold Rock River and hits some brisk rapids and undercurrents, following Adie on her journey.
When Adie is a child, her family is the picture of happiness, minus the normal angst among siblings and boy troubles. However, one day their family changes irrevocably. Her father drinks himself into a stupor, while her mother withdraws from her children and her husband. Rebecca, Adie's older sister, falls in love, becomes a mother, and moves out on her own. Clarissa, Rebecca's twin, is the sweetest of the sisters and wallows in food to shut out the pain. Although this story is about her family and how it evolves after a significant loss, the novel also is about family secrets and how those secrets eat up Adie and the family.
This beautiful image in Chapter Seventeen, page 162, holds a vast symbolic meaning in relation to this family's struggles and its one of my favorites:
Hog Gap and Cold Rock still had the mountain between them with no road cutting through. The only way to get from one spot to the other was to take the two-lane highway that ran around it. In the distance, Cold Rock Mountain rested like a fat king on his throne. The sides sparkled like jewels as the sun bounced off chunks of granite embedded along the edges.
Another of my favorite passages in this book is in Chapter Three, on page 33-34, shortly after Adie's mother becomes infatuated with Jackie Kennedy and her husband:
Mama was especially crazy about the pillbox hats Jackie wore. "Not every woman can wear them, you know," she said. "Takes a certain bone structure." Whatever type that was, Mama figured she had it. Every one of the dresses she made had its own matching pillbox hat, but they didn't look much like Jackie's. Mama used Pa's baseball caps as a base. She cut the bills off and covered what was left in whatever fabric she was working on at the time.
Adie is a bit tough to take at first with her disjointed narrative, but eventually her ramblings endear her to the reader. She struggles as a new wife and mother, particularly when she realizes her husband, Buck, is not as in love with her as she is with him and that his mother, Verna, has secrets of her own and hopes Adie will fail.
Miles easily weaves in the slave narrative of Tempe Jordan into Adie's story. Although these stories parallel one another in some ways, the stories shed light on the strength these women share. This is one of those novels that will stay with the reader once the last page is read, and it is now one of my top 5 books from this year.
Review: 2008-11-08
Great quick read!
This is by far one of the best books I've read in a long time! I couldn't put it down!
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Amazon List Price: $22.95
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