Chris Cander's Whisper Hollow is set entirely in the small town of Verra, a close-knit mining town in West Virginia. The novel is ostensibly the story of Alta Krol, and as such, the story is structured around Alta's life: as a young girl in Verra in the 1920s and as an aging woman in the same town in the 1960s. Alta is a fascinating and complicated character in her own right--a woman who yearns to be a painter and escape the mining life, but is bound by family duty to care for her widowed father and brothers--but she is only one part of Cander's multi-layered novel. Surrounding her are Myrthen, whose twin sister died tragically when they were nearly six; John Esposito, a young baseball player who dreams of being an architect; Lidia, the mother of a precocious son who may be able to see into the past--or tell the future; and a cast of small-town miners and villagers who stand by each other in times of need, but have also been known to tear each other down when their way of life feels threatened.
Cander (11 Stories) weaves together the stories of these varied characters across nearly five decades with skill and grace, and in her hands, Whisper Hollow grows into much more than the sum of its many parts. The result is a memorable novel about the bonds of town and family, the strength of friendships in unlikely places and the power of secrets to shape a life--or many lives--often without anyone even recognizing it. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm