Gentle’s Holler by Kerry Madden. Viking Juvenile, 2005. $16.99 — 237 pp.

Kerry Madden’s Gentle’s Holler tells the story of a large family living in poverty in a cove off Maggie Valley in the early 1960s. The narrator of this novel is Olivia Hyatt Weems, one of the young daughters of the family whose parents have named her for an older sister who died at birth, hence the name Livy Two.

Livy Two’s main concerns in the story are finding help for her sister, Gentle, “whose eyes don’t work right,” and encouraging her father in his music so that one day the family might be lifted out of its hard times. Livy Two befriends Miss Attickson, who runs the local bookmobile, and seeks her help in finding Braille books for her sister. Through her visits to the bookmobile, Livy also gives us evidence of her love of books and of reading.

In addition to facing real hunger — the family is often shown eating greens or corn bread — the Weems family also has conflicts with Grandma Horace, who wants the children raised by stricter standards and who is constantly after her daughter and husband to better themselves by seeking more stable employment.

Gentle’s Holler not only depicts life in the mountains when poverty was severe in so many places — remember that Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty program was aimed at Appalachia as much as anywhere else — but also shows the attractions of life in a large family. Here the children stick by one another, fight for one another, and in spite of their occasional squabbles, clearly love one another.

The Weems family serves to remind us that the family is the basis of civilization, that it is by means of the family, for better or for worse, that most of us become the people we are, that all the other institutions of our society — our schools, our government, our workplaces — are in many ways a reflection of the family. If we wish to build a civilization of love, if we wish to see change in our government or our schools, our entertainment or our work, we must begin with the family. On every page Madden shows us the joys and sorrows of belonging to a good family and how that family will shape us for the rest of our lives.

Some will fault Gentle’s Holler as being saccharine, a little contrived, and perhaps untrue to the deep poverty that once was a part of these hills (and still is, if truth be known, a part of these hills). Such fault-finding with Gentle’s Holler may say more about us than about the book. A society that finds even the normal and the good “cheesey,” as Madden says at the end of the book, is a society in trouble. What is best about Gentle’s Holler is its very normality, the fact that it gives us adolescents who seems real and vital to us.

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Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill continues to put out quality books. This spring, for example, they are publishing Midnight Assassin (ISBN 1-56512-306-9, $23.95), If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name (ISBN 1-56512-316-6, $23.95), and Stealing with Style (ISBN 1-56612-445-6, $22.95).

Patricia Bryan and Thomas Wolf, a husband and wife team who live in Chapel Hill, have written Midnight Assassin, the story of an Iowa family and of a murder that occurred in 1900. Margaret Hossack was accused of killing her sleeping husband with an ax. Though originally convicted of the murder, Hossack, who claimed that her husband was killed by an intruder (while she slept on beside him), was later released on appeal. The murder remains unsolved. Bryan and Wolfe do excellent work in resurrecting the facts of this case, giving us a riveting look into the workings of a family and the law one hundred years ago.

Stealing With Style by Emyl Jenkins should appeal to all readers who enjoy either a good mystery or antiques. The hero of this new series is Sterling Glass, an antiques appraiser and newspaper columnist who becomes involved in an investigation of theft and scams involving antiques. Emyl Jenkins, who has written several non-fiction books on antiques and is herself an antiques appraiser, brings both knowledge and wit to this lively book.

Heather Lende’s If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name gives us, as the subtitle says, news from small-town Alaska. Lende is a commentator for National Public Radio and a fine writer. Besides telling us something of her family life — her husband owns a lumber yard in Haines, Alaska, where they are raising five children — Lende gives us the town of Haines itself with all its eccentricities. Please watch for a full review of If You Lived Here in an upcoming issue of the Smoky Mountain News.

Good reading!

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)