Spellbound

Spellbound is co-sponsoring an appearance by author Edith Hemingway at the Hot Springs Community Learning Center at 356 NW Us 25 70 Hwy. You may contact the Center at 828-622-9575. Free and open to the public.

ROAD TO TATER HILL is a middle grade novel, set in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina during the summer of 1963.  Eleven-year-old Annie Winters struggles with grief after the death of her newborn sister and is isolated by her mother’s deepening depression.  Left much on her own, Annie finds comfort in holding an oblong stone she calls her “rock baby” and secretly befriends the mysterious Miss Eliza McGee, a reclusive mountain woman living in an abandoned house that folks say once belonged to a murderer.  As their friendship grows, Miss Eliza helps Annie come to terms with her loss while Annie draws Miss Eliza back into the mountain community, but only after a crisis reveals their unlikely alliance.

“Drawing on the author’s childhood roots, the heart of this first novel is the sense of place, described in lyrical words: the soaring mountains and the valley rippling outward in waves and waves of fading blue, like one of Grandma’s patchwork quilts.  True to Annie’s view-point, the particulars tell a universal drama of childhood grief, complete in all its sadness anger, loneliness, and healing.”  –Booklist