Blue Ridge Mountain Calling

by Edna Lineberry

198 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Tammy · Rating 1 out of 5]

A friend knew I was actively looking for books on local history and gave me this book to read. I wish that I could rate the first half of the book and the second half of the book separately. If that were possible, I would give the first half a 2.5 star rating. The second half I would give a 1 star rating. I enjoyed very much the stories in the first half of the book about the author's childhood in Greyson County of Southwest Virginia. Life was difficult for the author, but she approached her stories with humor. The author's mother was portrayed as overwhelmed with trying to care for her large family, and often left them to entertain and care for one another, pushing them out the door and out of her hair. While I greatly admired the author's ability to write the whole book in poetic rhythm with ending rhymes, I feel the stories could have been better told in prose. In the second half of the book, the author mostly left off the use of personal story telling and wrote poetry about various subjects including Biblical stories, religious encounters, patriotism, and one about a local young lady from Galax, Virginia who grew up to become Miss America in 1979 . With the second half of the book, I completely lost interest and could not wait to finish so that I could move on to something else. The history portrayed in the book is an important glimpse into a particular time in history in Southwest Virginia, but I am afraid most people will not put forth the effort into reading it in order to glean that information from the books pages. It is also important to note that there are racial slurs used in the telling of the stories in the first half of the book.