title: Mountain Girl
author: Byerly, Ken
description: Wade Talbot relishes the chaos of journalism. He starts as an editor of a weekly newspaper in North Carolina and becomes a reporter in New York just as the civil rights struggles explode in the 1960s. Becky Anderson leaps from her little southern town to college, to New York and then to Europe, where through sheer grit she becomes a force in the movie business. Wade romanticizes his boyhood in the hills of home. Becky, perennially short of money, can't wait to break away. But something clicks between them. They compete, they quarrel, they savage each other, and one day in the deep rolling hills of old Virginia they come together. Carolyn Pfeiffer, producer of many movies including The Whales of August, said of Mountain Girl, "It takes us to worlds lost and changed, to placed marked in the heart and wistfully remembered, as told through the eyes of an author who lived it and remembered and now asks us to live it with him." Wyatt Durrette, trail lawyer, author and 1985 Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia, wrote, "Ken takes us places you've never been and makes you feel that you were there. You catch glimpses of your own life, special moments when the coincidence of love and passion set sail, what is, what might have been. I am grateful I read this novel." Mountain Girl is a primer on the American civil rights movement, a gritty travelogue with stops in Paris and an island in the Mediterranean, and a sexual duel in which both partners learn and grow. Becky and Wade begin to hike the 2,200 mile Appalachian Trail, and Wade finds, finally, a theme for the novel he wants to write. But at a cost. He walks alone at the end to keep a promise, to climb a special mountain.