Whisper Hollow: A Novel
(Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

Chris Cander. (2015). Whisper Hollow: A Novel. Other Press.

Chris Cander. 2015. Whisper Hollow: A Novel. Other Press.

Chris Cander, Whisper Hollow: A Novel. Other Press, 2015.

Chris Cander. Whisper Hollow: A Novel. Other Press, 2015.

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title

Whisper Hollow

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1. • value: Christian
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Cander, Chris
   • bioText: Chris Cander graduated from the Honors College at the University of Houston, in the city where she was raised and still lives, with her husband, daughter, and son. For seven years she has been a writer-in-residence for Writers in the Schools there. She serves on the Inprint advisory board and stewards several Little Free Libraries in her community. Her first novel, 11 Stories, won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Popular Fiction. Whisper Hollow was long-listed for the Great Santini Fiction Prize by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. Her most recent novel, The Weight of the Piano, was a USA Today bestseller.
   • name: Chris Cander

publishDate

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title

Whisper Hollow

fullDescription

“Cander is a smart, deft storyteller.” —New York Times Book Review
From the nationally bestselling author of The Weight of the Piano comes a novel that “like D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, is about love that finds its object, and love that misses its mark.” —Charles Baxter
 
Set in a small coal-mining town, a debut novel full of secrets, love, betrayal, and suspicious accidents, where Catholicism casts a long shadow and two courageous women make choices that will challenge our own moral convictions.
 
One morning in Verra, a town nestled into the hillsides of West Virginia, the young Myrthen Bergmann is playing tug-of-war with her twin, when her sister is killed. Unable to accept her own guilt, Myrthen excludes herself from all forms of friendship and affection and begins a twisted, haunted life dedicated to God.
 
Meanwhile, her neighbor Alta Krol longs to be an artist even as her days are taken up caring for her widowed father and siblings. Everything changes when Myrthen marries the man Alta loves. Fourteen years later, we meet Lidia, a teenage girl in the same town, and her precocious son, Gabriel. When Gabriel starts telling eerily prescient stories that hint at Verra’s long-buried secrets, it’s not long before the townspeople begin to suspect that the boy harbors evil spirits—an irresistible state of affairs for Myrthen and her obsession with salvation.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus (starred review)
   • content: "[A] sweeping novel...Cander divinely delves into multiple points of view, crafting a collage of vibrant, layered characters while charting six decades of poignant, precise moments. A distinctive novel that sublimely measures the distressed though determined heartbeat of a small mountain community."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "[Chris Cander] admirably captures the lack of choice that men and women have in rural West Virginia."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: "Cander superbly envisions [Verra], the town, its residents' dynamics, and the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. Alta and Lidia [are] well-developed, believable characters whose mental fortitude and capacity to love linger in the reader's mind long after the last page."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Austin American-Statesman
   • content: "So masterfully controlled is the pace and tone of Whisper Hollow that you can swing a pickax without hitting any impurities. Rhythmic and beautiful, Whisper Hollow collides Old Testament with sooty coal town Americana in steady harmony."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Asheville Citizen-Times
   • content: "[Whisper Hollow] is an exploration of well-realized characters, their motivations and their responses to circumstances, written with a literary bent."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly
   • content: "Whisper Hollow is a haunting novel about the malleability of memory, about secrets and trickery, and about saints who are sinners and sinners who are saints. Cander paints a colorful portrait of a multi-ethnic, multi-generational West Virginia coal camp: a heaven of opportunity to some, a hell of stunted choices to others."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Charles Baxter, author of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories
   • content: "Like D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Chris Cander's beautiful novel, Whisper Hollow, is about love that finds its object, and love that misses its mark and becomes destructive, in a community of coal miners. The story's locale is one where love (for God,or others) is blocked or displaced until that moment when it can finally express itself, in a setting where work itself may be deadly and time may always run out. Chris Cander's understanding of men and women is profound, and the scenes in this wonderful book will stay with you like a visionary experience."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Peter Geye, author of The Lighthouse Road
   • content: "The men in Chris Cander's Whisper Hollow toil underground, in the dark and dangerous coal mines of West Virginia. But her women mine territory twice as dark and twice as dangerous, they mine the human heart. Love and loss, devotion and longing, hope and despair, Cander renders all of this and more through the lives of three women spanning more than fifty years. Here is a novel so full of life--of its beauty and cruelty--that I emerged from it like one of those men walking from mines she so wonderfully evokes, like a man walking from the darkness into the light."
9. • premium: False
   • source: David Eagleman, author of Incognito and SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
   • content: "Cander writes with tremendous power and originality. Whisper Hollow grabs the reader with an immediacy that does not let go: this novel is inspired, haunting and heartbreakingly beautiful."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Jamie Ford, New York Times best-selling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
    • content: "Sometimes fiction is so good, so authentic, and the storyteller so convincing, that it just feels true. Whisper Hollow is one of those books. I'm blown away, honestly. Chris Cander has created characters with immortal souls."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Ann-Marie MacDonald, author of Adult Onset
    • content: "With memorable characters and a haunting setting, Chris Cander weaves a compelling tale of the transformative power of love in the face of buried truths that threaten literally to explode."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
    • content: "Her conclusion provides grounds for belief in the possibility of redemption; her sensitivity ensures that this novel will appeal to anyone with a story to tell, a group that includes us all."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus
    • content: "A wonderfully clever compilation."
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 12, 2015
      Cander’s follow-up to 2013’s 11 Stories is inextricably rooted in West Virginia coal country—the rough locale that determines and intertwines her characters’ fates. The obligation-vs.-love plot is divided into two parts: the first half introduces two women, Myrthen, a beauty with an unsettling dark streak who devotes herself to God after her twin sister’s death, and Alta, a housewife with an artist’s soul. Cander closely tracks how Myrthen’s and Alta’s romantic decisions unknowingly complicate each other’s lives in the lead-up to a tragic incident that bisects the novel. Picking up their story 17 years later, Cander then homes in on Lidia, a young mother who meets good-witch Alta and bad-witch Myrthen. It reads like standard smalltown dramatic fare—that is, until a paranormal twist: Lidia’s son develops uncanny foresight. Cander’s exploration of these promising interpersonal dynamics is encumbered by cliché, inconsistencies of structure and character, and an awkwardly rigid chronological frame, but she admirably captures the lack of choice that men and women have in rural West Virginia. “It’s called a ‘mine’ for a reason,” one character states. “’Cause everybody’s working to support their own. I’ll be working to support mine.”

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from January 1, 2015
      Verra, West Virginia, is the setting of this sweeping novel, in which first- and second-generation immigrants with coal-stained hands and blackened lungs forge new lives for their growing families amid secrets that run as deep and dark as the coal mines.Between the years 1916 and 1969, Alta Krol and Myrthen Bergmann encounter each other only a few times. Little do they realize their lives are as intertwined as a wreath made from the thin branches of a myrtle tree. Alta is driven by artistic passion, her love for Myrthen's husband and a dream to flee the hills of Appalachia. "She'd never been to Florida, or anywhere but where she was right then, in a lackluster coal-mining town with mountains like arms around her, always squeezing. Every day of all of her thirty-eight years had been spent in a town that, at its greatest density, contained only a little more than seven thousand people." Religious fervor, a desire to extricate herself from her loveless marriage and a maniacal ambition to become a nun drive Myrthen. "It seemed Heaven was the only place she might find love; none of her relationships with the living had turned out particularly well." A devastating mine explosion buries their sins and the burdens of their shame, until many years later, when the 3-year-old town prophet, Gabriel, unearths them, providing both Alta and Myrthen, at long last, reckoning and redemption. Cander (11 Stories, 2013, etc.) divinely delves into multiple points of view, crafting a collage of vibrant, layered characters while charting six decades of poignant, precise moments. A distinctive novel that sublimely measures the distressed though determined heartbeat of a small mountain community.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 15, 2015
      Cander's fourth novel, following her award-winning 11 Stories (2013), spans 53 years and highlights key personal events in the lives of residents in a West Virginia mining town. When a six-year-old girl dies in a mishap, her twin sister, Mythren, turns repressed guilt into religious zeal that poisons her life and those of other townspeople. Years later, Alta Krol becomes unknowingly bound to Mythren by virtue of loving the man Mythren marries, and by entering her own ill-fated marriage at the same church, on the same day. Yet Alta's tale is one of triumpha life of familial devotion and feminine strength that is reflected in a young woman named Lidia, with whom she forms a profound friendship years later. Cander superbly envisions the town, its residents' dynamics, and the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. Although Mythren's narrative turns a bit too gothic, Cander rewards the reader with Alta and Lidia, well-developed, believable characters whose mental fortitude and capacity to love linger in the reader's mind long after the last page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

popularity

99

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“Cander is a smart, deft storyteller.” —New York Times Book Review
From the nationally bestselling author of The Weight of the Piano comes a novel that “like D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, is about love that finds its object, and love that misses its mark.” —Charles Baxter
 
Set in a small coal-mining town, a debut novel full of secrets, love, betrayal, and suspicious accidents, where Catholicism casts a long shadow and two courageous women make choices that will challenge our own moral convictions.
 
One morning in Verra, a town nestled into the hillsides of West Virginia, the young Myrthen Bergmann is playing tug-of-war with her twin, when her sister is killed. Unable to accept her own guilt, Myrthen excludes herself from all forms of friendship and affection and begins a twisted, haunted life dedicated to God.
 
Meanwhile, her...

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