A Land More Kind Than Home (Platinum Readers Circle (Center Point)) (P.S.)

by Wiley Cash

A New York Times bestseller and winner of the UK's John Creasey Award for Debut Crime Novel of the Year

'Mesmerizing. Intensely felt and beautifully told' New York Times

One Sunday nine-year-old Jess Hall watches in horror as his autistic brother is smothered during a healing service in the mountains of North Carolina.

Wiley Cash uses this haunting image - inspired by a horrific true event - to spin us into a spellbinding, heartbreaking story about cruelty and innocence, and the failure of faith and family to protect a child.

This is a novel thick with stories and characters connected by faith, infidelity, and a sense of hope that is both tragic and unforgettable.

• ISBN10: 0062088238
• ISBN13: 9780062088239
• Publish Date: 22 January 2013 (first published 29 March 2012)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Collins
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 368
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

It takes a special kind of book for me to get over the first-person voice— double that for a nine-year-old’s first person voice— and this just wasn’t it. None of it sounded right or real. I grew up around this area, and around these churches (we were Pentecostal Holiness; not quite “Signs Following”) and still the story never came to life. It’s problematic when your nine-year-old kid, your elderly spinster, and your wise old sheriff have indistinguishable voices. I know these people, and it didn’t ring true.

Also problematic: the backstory, the dialogue. Re-reading The Long Home at the same time did not help matters.

I read this staying in a little cabin in Mars Hill, though. In fact, I bought this at the little used bookshop in Weaverville. If there was ever a place to read it, that was it.

“I’ve always heard it’s a different world up here, and sometimes I wonder if it just might be. When I first came over from Henderson, I’d drive through this county and see signs and markers for towns like Mars Hill and places like Jupiter and all kinds of things like that, and I’d think, Jesus, Clem, how’d you end up here? But I’ll be damned if it’s not beautiful: these green fields where farms line the ridges and the spaces in between hide dark hollers and deep coves where the sunlight might not ever reach.”