A bit of a disappointment. In Nahai's other novels that I've read she brought to life immensely interesting characters that I greatly enjoyed reading about. That was not the case in this novel, whose characters I felt estranged from and mostly uninterested in throughout.

The story is centered on Adam, the illegitimate child of an Appalachian snake handling preacher and a dirt poor mother. He is abandoned by both into an orphanage, and when he reaches adulthood he bitterly leaves his origins behind and becomes an international reporter. Much of the book is taken up with the backstory of Adam's family, drawing the brutal lives of his ancestors in coal mining Appalachia.

When Adam's father dies from a snake bite during a church service, Adam for some reason is compelled to abscond from his reporting post in Lebanon and return to Tennessee to angrily seek out who he thinks is his father's murderer. I had trouble accepting this basic premise to the story - that Adam, as described, someone who viewed human connections as a weakness and detested his childhood, would go to such lengths to return to "uncover the truth" of what happened when he accidentally learns of his absent father's death.

The woman who handed Adam's father the snake that killed him is called Blue, and she is of Kurdish Jewish origins. She is brought from Kurdistan to Tennessee to be the wife of a ghostly figure on the faculty of the University in Knoxville. Part of the book describes her family's life in the mountains of Iran and Iraq in a deeply tribal society. She and Adam have an instant attraction, both outsiders who've never felt as if they truly belonged where they are, despite all their efforts. In the end, Adam must decide whether he will save Blue from arrest and whether he can manage to place trust in another human being again.

Nahai's prose, as in her other novels, is really quite good. I like her a good deal as a writer. This particular story and these characters, unfortunately, I just never could find much imaginative sympathy with. ( )