The Denise Giardina novel from the late ‘80s still rings true and strong.
“Every American should read ‘Storming Heaven,’ and every lover of good books should know this masterful writer’s voice. Anything I read after this will never be as important.”
— Caroline Chute, author,
“The Beans of Egypt, Maine”
Raised in a West Virginia coal camp, Denise Giardina writes with beauty and passion about railroad and coal company exploitation in early 20th-century Appalachia.
Told by four rotating first-person narrators—among them a coal-camp nurse, a union organizer, and an Italian miner’s wife—“Storming Heaven” follows the fate of West Virginians whose lives were overtaken and destroyed by coal companies. It’s got everything you want in a compelling novel: catastrophe, love, and loss; birth and death; war and a journey home.
With the miners’ unionization struggles culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain at the core of Giardina’s novel, the question for the curious reader is simply this: who will survive, and at what price?
And the title? One character puts it this way when pressed to define Heaven: “’Heaven is this here. Hit’s all these men together, and you, and knowing this here is the way we was meant to do. But it only lasts a minute. Then hit’s gone.’”
That’s how it is with this novel—it’s over too soon, and the glimpse of Heaven is as real as it gets.
The story above appears in our November/December 2019 issue. For more subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription. Thank you for your support!
