With a measured touch, A. Carter Sickels tells the story of Dove Creek, W.Va., a town where most families either die off or leave for bigger cities, selling their small homesteads to the mining conglomerates decapitating the nearby mountains and pushing the refuse back into the hollows. Those who stay wind up working at Wal-Mart, the local bars and cafes or in the brutal mine pits--while their old folks stay in the nursing home until their money runs out.
Cole Freeman is a survivor--a local whose father left before his birth and whose "sinful" mother was banished by his grandfather, a tongue-talking, snake-handling preacher with a sixth-grade education. In Sickels's sure hands, Cole's story is told without rancor or histrionics. Raised by his grandfather, Cole learns resilience with a "we'll figure something out" attitude that leads him to a job as an aide at the nursing home. He cleans up after the incontinent, talks to the demented and watches over the residents' diets and meds. But he also learns how to steal their keepsake jewelry, meager cash and extra Xanax or Oxycontin to sell to the bored, dead-ended young people still in town.
Cole is no ordinary drug dealer; he repays the old people for their pills and never takes what they truly need. He sensitively cares for his frightening grandfather and supportive grandmother who still live at home. And he doesn't sells drugs to family. It is Sickels's great compassion for his characters that distinguishes this fine first novel. --Bruce Jacobs