I love books about Appalachia and this one did not disappoint. The Ballad of Laurel Springs is well-written, with very good character development and an intriguing storyline. The story unfolds through the viewpoints of many different perspectives across multiple generations. A fantastic read! ( )

This book starts in 2019, and goes backwards to 1908, following a generation of women and their daughters mostly through story and ballad. You learn about a murder ballad and then about the woman the ballad was written about. It is an ambitious feat for the author, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, it was difficult to leave each character and go on to the character that she was connected to. The story was engrossing, but often, I wanted to learn more about the character that I was leaving before starting the next one. The author could have easily stretched the story out into a series of books That would have been more satisfying, but there is a problem here.

Often when you go back in family history, the earliest generation is the least known. For example, in one part of my family tree, the earliest woman on my father's died on her wedding day. I know her name, birth and death date and who she married but nothing else. I do not know why she died and anything about her as a person except that she was born, married and died in England. This is spare, but unless you are royalty or famous, the details of our lives vanish as time goes on. A younger sister continued the family line,

Ballads also do not give you the full story. We learn what happened, but often not why,

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher as a win in a First Reads contest. My thoughts and feelings in this review are my own. ( )

This lovely and engaging novel tells the stories of generations of women in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee. We start with a current-day girl, and then go backwards in time to the early 1900s, to the girl's great-great-great-great grandmother, then ahead a generation, and so on through the line of women in this small Tennessee town. The author focuses her story around a series of ballads original to the region, particularly one "murder ballad" that supposedly involves one of the female forbears of the characters. In fact, each chapter (with its focus on a different woman) is titled after another folk song, and the lyrics of the songs, interwoven into the chapters and stories, adds a nice depth and feel for the region, for the history of the place, and for the culture.

The women's stories are varied, with each women experiencing her own trials and tribulations, conflicts and problems inherent to the time, place and culture. However, I loved how the author repeated certain plot elements and points from one chapter to the next, echoing the other women's tales.

What I did not like so much was the (necessarily) too brief and shallow look at each woman's story. It seemed that just as I was getting interested in a storyline, the author cuts off the tale to switch to another timeline and another woman. That is the drawback when painting this many portraits (9 in all!) in an average-sized novel. The author tries to connect the women together, particularly when a woman from a previous chapter is still alive and connected in some way to the woman of the current story, but I still felt cheated of a more in-depth story. ( )