Ann Pancake’s 2007 novel Strange as This Weather Has Been centered on mountaintop removal and its effects upon a single coal mining family. In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, a follow-up collection of eleven astonishing short stories, Pancake returns to her native West Virginia to tell stories of other traditional people. These are folks living much as they have for three hundred years, tried by poverty and ill health but needing the coal companies’ upon which the economy is entirely dependent, even as they witness the air and land and water of this beautiful place being imperiled and destroyed.
Ann Pancake’s ear for the Appalachian dialect in both towns and in the countryside -- is both pitch perfect and respectful, that of one who writes from the heart of this world. Her characters are ensnared in the complexities of rural economies where there are no quick fixes to questions surrounding right livelihood even going off to college. With first-hand knowledge of the provincial locale and her exquisite depictions of the intricacies of families, she might well remind you of Alice Munro. In her intimate depiction of the natural history of rural Appalachia, Me and My Daddy
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