Review: You can take the girl out of the hills....
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 16, 2013
Orphaned by the Civil War, an 18-year-old girl from the hills of Kentucky heads west on a wagon train, only to discover the devils she knew at home may have been preferable to the devils in disguise she encounters along the trail.Despite a couple of formatting, word-choice, and punctuation glitches, THE HANDSOMEST MAN IN THE COUNTRY is an excellent read, mostly because author Nancy Radke nailed an unusual -- and unusually charming -- character voice. (The writing could use a substantial infusion of commas, but even that perceived shortcoming fades into insignificance behind the sheer enjoyment of the reading experience.)The sweet romance (no harsh language or sex) is told in first-person, which represents a significant risk for the author. The music of the hills is in the way Apalachian people think and speak. Attempting to render such a distinctive patois in prose without losing readers is challenging, but author Nancy Radke did an admirable job. Little of the language is presented in dialect (phonetic spelling, elisions like dropped Gs, etc.), but the sentence structure, word choices, and rhythm of the writing all evoke the color and flavor of the unsophisticated, hardscrabble, pragmatic attitude of the area.Writers often are cautioned about using dialect, because it can be tiresome to read. Ms. Radke's novella demonstrates how smoothly and respectfully dialect can be suggested without resorting to trickery or parody.