ABOUT
It started with two characters.
One, a New York sociologist hungry for answers, both professional and personal. As she attempts to conduct a year-long study of a declining mining town in the southern coal fields of West Virginia, a land of buried history, she reveals she has buried history of her own. She needs to discover if DNA is destiny.
The other, a fourteen-year-old mute daughter of a broken miner, orphaned by a faml. Her plight reveals a community in jeopardy and generations of secrets.
These two characters are brought together by a murder/homicide that forces both to face her deepest fears of what this town represents for them.
What they experience is nothing short of resurrection.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K.J. Bryant lives and writes in Pittsburgh, but spent four years traveling the roads of southern West Virginia confronting buried history and learning about a coalmining industry that wants to keep it that way. She immersed herself in the uncharted landscape of her debut novel, Reclaiming Grace.
Although the novel takes place in 1992, KJ first had to learn about 150+ years of coal mining in Appalachia and the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed insurrection in the United States other than the Civil War. Why did 10,000 coal miners take up arms and how does that almost forgotten battle impact their descendants?
Along the way, K.J. found out what a writer really has to do to tell an authentic story. Research, of course. But more important, learn to see into the heart and soul of a culture the rest of the country dismisses with convenient stereotypes. Luckily, she found the most surprising guides.
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