Want to engage your reader right off? Start your story with an arrival, and your reader can’t help but ask, “Who is it? What is it? I’d best go along for the ride to find out.”
“Pine Gap” does just that. Only it’s a letter, not a person, that arrives. Letcher County, Kentucky high school senior Jamie Eskill is waiting for her college acceptance letter. It’s time for her to leave her small coalmining town and enter the larger world—the first in her family to let go of their ways.
Her father Enoch mines coal; her mother Miriam cleans houses for his bosses; her estranged single-parent sister cuts hair. Jamie makes her money digging out mountain laurel from mountains about to be mined. And the money goes into “Jamie’s College Jug.”
Jamie loves them all, and the leaving will be hard. All she knows of the outside world comes from hopping a train to Ashland with her boyfriend Jared. That’s where she is when disaster hits home.
The characters in Pine Gap are people like you and me, who wonder if they’ve done the right things at the right times and go on to learn from them. They’re good people, but they’re not perfect people. And the drama in their lives comes in small and believable doses.
What’s especially memorable about the novel is that Rexroat starts every chapter with a couple pages of lyrical and honest coal town observation. How the trains—and now the ATVs—run through Pine Gap. How the film crews come to document the decay of mountain Main Streets, dropping a few thousand dollars in town coffers. And, too, how the music comes from church windows: “The melodies, the words, the rhythms and the rich harmonies of those old hymns are imprinted so deeply in your being that holding a hymnal or staring at lyrics on a projection screen would seem vapid and counterintuitive.”
There aren’t a lot of surprises in Brooks Rexroat’s novel, Pine Gap. But sometimes a read that carries us across rough water to a gentle landing is just what we need.
Pine Gap, by Brooks Rexroat. Peasantry Press. 2019. 338 pp.
The story above first appeared in our July / August 2022 issue.
