When I finished Cold Rock River, two words immediately came to mind: pain and hope. J.L. Miles does a superb job describing the many tragedies that plague Adie Jenkins and her family, and she's able to balance these horrible things with a sense that everything will be all right in the end--even when the end is nowhere in sight.

Adie's family is forever changed when her youngest sister, Annie, drowns in Cold Rock River. Annie was just three years old, and Adie wasn't much older. Adie carries the guilt with her into her teens, as she was the one watching Annie at the time. By letting Adie tell the story in the first person, Miles pushes you in the midst of a family struggling but happy one day, one child short and in shambles the next. The book opens with Adie recalling a memory of Annie as a one-year-old choking on a jelly bean Adie gave her and their father's desperate attempt to save her. Miles immediately grabs the reader with writing that makes you feel as though you're sitting on the porch on a hot summer night and actually hearing Adie's words.

The book jumps forward 12 years. It's 1963 in Cold Rock, Georgia, and Adie is 17 and pregnant. Her older sister, Rebecca, already has a few kids with different fathers; her other sister, Clarissa, dealt with her grief over Annie's death by eating herself fat; her mother has grown cold toward her husband; and her father has turned to the bottle. Adie is thrown out of the house to deal with her situation as a grown up, and she marries the baby's father, Buck Jenkins, and moves in with his mother and his brain-damaged brother. Despite Buck's roving eye, she is determined to make the marriage work. They move to Hog Gap, and Adie meets Murphy, a local chicken farmer and landowner who is immediately attracted to her and allows her and Buck to move into the dilapidated cabin on his property that once belonged to his mammy, Willa Mae.

more ( )

I loved this story. Adie was so strong through everything that she had to endure. I also enjoyed Tempe's diary, and the way that Willa Mae and Adie's lives were intertwined. J.L. Miles did not disappoint in her second novel...this book is definitely a keeper. ( )

Story of Adie, a 17 year old who finds herself pregnant and married quickly to a philandering husband. The newlyweds move in with his mother in a nearby town and she is befriended by a man named Murphy and his black Mammy, named Willa Mae. Adie reads from a diary that belonged to one of Willa Mae's relatives and chapters alternate between the time of slavery and the 1960's. Incredibly predictable story. ( )

J.L. Miles' Cold Rock River flows in and out of the past and present of Adie Thacker's life and occasionally transports the reader into the thicket of plantations and slavery near the time of the Civil War. The reader travels along the current of Cold Rock River and hits some brisk rapids and undercurrents, following Adie on her journey.

When Adie is a child, her family is the picture of happiness, minus the normal angst among siblings and boy troubles. However, one day their family changes irrevocably. Her father drinks himself into a stupor, while her mother withdraws from her children and her husband. Rebecca, Adie's older sister, falls in love, becomes a mother, and moves out on her own. Clarissa, Rebecca's twin, is the sweetest of the sisters and wallows in food to shut out the pain. Although this story is about her family and how it evolves after a significant loss, the novel also is about family secrets and how those secrets eat up Adie and the family.

This beautiful image in Chapter Seventeen, page 162, holds a vast symbolic meaning in relation to this family's struggles and its one of my favorites:

Hog Gap and Cold Rock still had the mountain between them with no road cutting through. The only way to get from one spot to the other was to take the two-lane highway that ran around it. In the distance, Cold Rock Mountain rested like a fat king on his throne. The sides sparkled like jewels as the sun bounced off chunks of granite embedded along the edges.

Another of my favorite passages in this book is in Chapter Three, on page 33-34, shortly after Adie's mother becomes infatuated with Jackie Kennedy and her husband:

Mama was especially crazy about the pillbox hats Jackie wore. "Not every woman can wear them, you know," she said. "Takes a certain bone structure." Whatever type that was, Mama figured she had it. Every one of the dresses she made had its own matching pillbox hat, but they didn't look much like Jackie's. Mama used Pa's baseball caps as a base. She cut the bills off and covered what was left in whatever fabric she was working on at the time.

Adie is a bit tough to take at first with her disjointed narrative, but eventually her ramblings endear her to the reader. She struggles as a new wife and mother, particularly when she realizes her husband, Buck, is not as in love with her as she is with him and that his mother, Verna, has secrets of her own and hopes Adie will fail.

Miles easily weaves in the slave narrative of Tempe Jordan into Adie's story. Although these stories parallel one another in some ways, the stories shed light on the strength these women share. This is one of those novels that will stay with the reader once the last page is read, and it is now one of my top 5 books from this year. ( )

Cold Rock River by J.L. Miles is a wonderful, captivating piece of southern fiction that will draw you into the lives of its characters, as well as the rural Georgia setting.

Miles creates such a strong sense of what Adie, the narrator of Cold Rock River, is up against. No one in Adie's family has been the same since Adie's sister Annie died years ago. The cause of Annie's death is not revealed until the end of the book, but the reader knows it has happened and that it has created a gaping tear in the fabric of the family.

When Adie finds herself pregnant at age 17, she marries the father of her baby. She thinks she loves him, but she also sees marriage as her only option. Unfortunately, her husband turns out to be incapable of both marital fidelity and holding a job.

What makes Adie and her story special is how she responds to all this misfortune. Adie is unique in that she wants more from life than everyone around her has. She is strong, smart, motivated, and imbued with an endearing integrity.

I found myself hoping that Adie could rise above her circumstances. I grew to care about several secondary characters also. I also enjoyed the excerpts from the diary of a liberated slave woman that Adie read and shared with the reader throughout the book. Besides having an air of mystery, the diary became an important element in Adie's compelling story. ( )