Hill Women: Finding Family and A Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains review

Title:  Hill Women: Finding Family and A Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains 

Author: Cassie Chambers 

Chapters: 18 Plus Epilogue 

Pages: 304

Genre: Memoir 

Rating: 4 stars 

Publisher:  Ballantine Books 

I was a little wary about reading Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains by Cassie Chambers, because the previous book I'd read about Kentucky's Appalachian communities focused on the bad.  However, with Hill women, I didn't have to worry about that.   Cassie doesn't sugar coat anything about her childhood in Owsley county the poorest county in Kentucky and one of the poorest in the United States and Berea a small college town in Eastern Kentucky, but she shares both the good and the bad.  She sheds light on what life is really like for the people who call the mountains and hollers home.  

She tells of how her granny and her aunt Ruth encouraged first her mother and then her to get an education, which took her away from home for a bit, but she eventually found her way back with a law degree that she has since used to help rural women in her home state. I also learned why reading this that she helped get a very important law passed in Kentucky that helps domestic violence survivors. I love my state but when it comes to many laws were are way behind the times.

Something that struck me was the author and I are around the same age from the state and had similar family setups.  Like the author, I spent many a summer on the family farm and the Tobacco field, only in my case it was my great grandparent's farm in rural Western Kentucky not Eastern Kentucky.  While the author was only one generation removed from her family's rural past many members of her family still live in their rural community. I am two generations removed from my family's rural past and many of my family still live in their rural communities.  And unlike the author who was a second-generation college graduate, I am a first-generation college graduate whose maternal grandfather who himself only had an eighth-grade education helped pay my way through college and encouraged me when it got hard. 

The author points out something that seems to be lacking in other memoirs about Appalachian upbringings is that while they are those who are lazy and want to work the system, there are also those who work hard to get an education but have to leave to find a job. And those who want to work can't find a job because there aren't any jobs in the area. And they can't afford to leave.  

To me, Cassie Chambers wrote the most truthful and tasteful memoir about childhood and life in Kentucky's Appalachian that I have read.