Appalachia

Appalachia, written by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Barry Moser, won the 1991 Parents’ Choice Award. This book is a description of the daily lives of people living in the Appalachian Mountains. The thing that struck me the most about this book was the positive way she portrayed the people living there. Whenever I think of Appalachia, poor towns and tired, dirty coal miners come to mind. While she did mention this a little bit, she also focused on people who go on to become professionals and how happy the people are who live there.

The first thing I noticed about this book was that the text carries on to the next page mid-sentence. Authors have a reason for everything that they do, so there must be a reason for this. As I was reading the book, I thought that maybe she chose to do this in order to make the book more like a chapter book, where sentences often carry on to the next page. Adding to this, the pictures in this book are small and don’t take up the whole page. Generally the pictures in a picture book will cover a significant portion at least one of the two pages; however, the pictures in this book are centered in the middle section of the left page and hardly take up half of it. Moser’s illustrations are like pictures in a photo album. While reading, I could easily imagine the people Rylant was describing looking through the book and seeing pictures of their grandmother and grandfather, their dog, or their church, for example.

When I was reading this book, I was constantly reminded of my family who lives in Appalachian North Carolina. Rylant mentions the names of some people who might live in Appalachia, like Mamie, Boyd, and Oley; I was reminded of my family members Melvin, Wade, Foster, and Ora. Like Mamie, Boyd, Oley and their dogs Prince and King, Melvin, Wade, Foster and Ora have were born and have lived in Appalachia their entire lives.

One thing she said about the people of Appalachia that surprised me was that most of the people living there don’t end up leaving. I thought that recently, younger generations have been leaving the area and moving elsewhere. That is what my grandparents did. They left rural North Carolina to start a family in Richmond, Virginia. Although they never moved back to North Carolina, they did visit often and always helped out their family and friends in any way possible. Rylant talks about how people have quilts in their bedrooms and that they are folded up and stored during the summer, making them smell like old wood and moth balls. This part reminded me a lot of my grandmother, even though she does not live in small-town Appalachia anymore. She stores everything in moth balls for some reason, so everything she pulls out of the attic smells like them.

This book is a great way to expose young readers to one of the many different ways of life within their country. It would be useful even for young readers who are familiar with the region because it might conjure up some great memories for them, just like it did for me!