I was surprised that this book was not so much about Sadie Blue as it was about the whole town. I was also a bit surprised that the “stranger” wasn’t really a stranger, but a person that newly moved to town. There wasn’t anything creepy or worrisome about the stranger. I was expecting there to be something a bit more mysterious there.

In general, I felt that there were too many points of view in this story. We hear from everyone: Sadie, Sadie’s grandmother, Sadie’s aunt, the preacher, the preacher’s sister, the teacher, the town’s witch doctor, some random 12 year old boy named Tattler, Roy, and even Roy’s best friend. There were 14 chapters and 10 different POVs. Some of these POVs definitely could have been skipped, especially since the stories overlap. Some chapters are telling stories you’ve already heard from a different perspective with very little added to the actual story.

The story was interesting, but I would have liked a bit more continuity with the perspective, which would have also added more movement to the story. Occasionally, the story felt stalled as you heard it again from the changed perspective and I was looking for it to make some new progress.

Overall, I thought it was good, but didn’t love it and I really expected to. I felt it had more potential than it lived up to.

When I was growing up, my great-grandmother Nan (born Lora Dena) was very nice to me and my siblings, and very mean to some other people in my family. She was old when I was born, with a cap of white hair and a heavily wrinkled face, and she favored cardigans in sober colors, button-down shirts, and black orthopedic shoes. Her querulous voice was a constant backdrop in my grandparents’s house; it’s no exaggeration to say that she spent a great deal of time complaining and demanding, and my grandmother worked hard to make her happy.

Of course I recognize that she had a long life, that she was elderly, and those facts presented their own difficulties and challenges. But by most accounts, she had been this way--even worse, they said--for as long as people had known her. It would have been easy to dismiss Nan as a mean person—to a lot of people at least. But that would be too simplistic. Because she could be loving, to some of us. She could be protective. She could be proud of our achievements. And then there were other things that indicated a richer, more complex nature, like how she wrote poetry, which she sometimes shared with me and my sister and which we found in her room after her death. There were also the bits and pieces of her history, which I learned, not from her, but from my grandmother and genealogical research I’d done. Nan had lost multiple children, in one tragedy after another. Her husband had left her.

So much loss. Sadness. Beauty. And yet, meanness too. It was all there.

Leah Weiss’s If the Creek Don’t Rise reminded me of our brilliant, perplexing human nature. That good and bad can exist within the same person, and a decision can be both good and bad as well. How your life doesn’t look the same from your perspective as it does from mine. How family pain can be passed down—a lesson I learned well from studying my own extended family—but it’s possible for a person to refuse to carry it into the next generation. (Thank you, Dad.)

It’s difficult for me to reduce this book to a plot, because its richness lies in its characterization and language. Told from multiple perspectives, If the Creek Don’t Rise is set in 1970 Baines Creek, North Carolina, a largely isolated Appalachian community where the arrival of an outside teacher, a jasper, is a big deal. The book opens with Sadie Blue’s perspective as she’s being abused by her newlywed husband, Roy. In subsequent chapters, we get perspectives from her grandmother, a godmother-like figure, her preacher, her teacher, other neighbors, and eventually her husband.

Weiss’s book is compassionate. By the time that I got to some character’s chapters, I already disdained, if not actively disliked them, based on other people’s stories. And yet I always found that there was something to learn about those disliked people. Some secret that didn’t excuse what they had done, not by a long shot, but that showed that they had their own pains they’d been shuffling along. Those moments were revelatory, particularly after I reflected that their secrets were revealed only to the reader; the people they were interacting with in the story--the people they were hurting--would likely never know.

There’s so much that I could say about this incredible book. That it’s beautifully written. Lee Smith-esque. A valuable contribution to contemporary Appalachian literature, particularly in its portrayal of womanhood. A meditation on what it means to be human. So I think I’ll just close by saying that If the Creek Don’t Rise reminded me to be kinder and more empathetic, and that my judgement of a person (for good or for bad) will forever fail at seeing and acknowledging the entirety of a person. We all have whole worlds inside of us.

I loved this book.

**I received an ARC of this book through Netgalley, but all opinions provided are my own.

This book kind of surprised me. It took much longer to finish than I intended to. For a while, I lost interest in the book simply because it felt like we'd never get back to Sadie Blue. I knew she was the main character but it seemed like the glimpses we got of the other characters were incomplete. Except for Roy.

In his one chapter, I understood more about him than any other character besides Sadie. His character seemed the most developed and I feel like we got a good idea of who he was; almost to the point of pitying him.

The ending seemed a little off to me which is why I gave it 4 stars. I didn't strike Billy as being so forward with Sadie when he brought Roy home. I was disappointed Weiss opted to give him a slightly pervy attitude with Sadie: the way he touched her and what he said.

Because Sadie was robbed of her crowning moment, it makes sense that she reacted the way she did. But it was the gesture by Billy that left me unsettled and subsequently what followed. I really thought the ending would've been brighter and Sadie wouldn't have sent Billy off with the moonshine. It was beyond disappointing.

I enjoyed most of the book but I felt like it had more potencial. The book could have been way better. It is a very entertaining book it is just not my cupm of tea.

I really enjoyed this book. I LOVED Sadie's character and I felt there was depth. I don't usually read southern or historical fiction but I decided to take a chance on this one and I'm glad I did. The family dynamics were also very interesting. Each character featured had depth. I loved the descriptors. Highly recommended.

I absolutely LOVED this novel! I know it won't be for everyone, but being a female from the Deep South who adores character studies that manage to become the plot itself made this the perfect read for me! The unique form of dialogue and slow building tension worked well in my humble opinion; the broken dialect reflected the time period's lack of value for women and the dark struggle that many have endured at the hands of a violent drunk. The story was very straight forward; there isn't much sense of mystery or suspense in the natural sense, but I found that the tension building between Roy and Sadie really catapulted the story forward and gripped me for the entirety of the narrative. Oh, and that ending? I thought it was brilliant. I must be the odd ball out, as I felt there was complete closure to the story and nothing was really left hanging. Highly recommended for those who enjoy deep characterization of rough folks in a historical fiction setting that feels as if it could have been written in today's time.

An incredibly powerful look at 1970's Appalachia told through a wide range of narrators. This story is heartbreaking and eye-opening, with just a little bit of magical realism to cut through the despair. Highly recommended for fans of dark and gritty Southern literature, and for anyone who wants stories that speak to a part of our country often forgotten.

I don't know why it took me so long to crack this book open! It must have gotten lost in the sea of books on my Kindle. This book is a must read!! Powerful and daring on every page. I will be recommending this one to everyone I know! The characters are three dimensional, the pacing is absolutely perfect, and the storyline is one that will yank the reader in and forget to let go...even after the book ends.

Odd to think I can relate to this story as a northerner from a Southern family, but I can in many ways. It's a slow summer read. Some dramas, but interesting.; it will hold your attention. I suggest it as a summer read. i think many people would enjoy the story. It's well written.

I read this book in exchange for a review for NetGalley.

As my 4 star rating suggests, I really liked this book. I found that it grew on my as I read it. The story is told linearly from multiple points of few, and while some authors struggle with this, I found that it really worked here. Each time the character changed, there was enough repetition so that you knew where you were starting, but done in a very subtle way so that you didn't feel like you were hearing something you'd heard a million times already. It actually reminded me a lot about how stories get passed along in small town, which I'm sure the author was trying to achieve. Well done there!

Each character then took ownership of the story and gave us something new, or revealed something that the next character would expand upon. At first, the grammar threw me off a little bit, but as it is being used to immerse you in the world that the story takes place in (Appalachia), after awhile you get used to it.

Two things that I find interesting:
1.) The book blurb depicts the story being about Sadie Blue, and while she is a main character and the book begins and ends with her, I'm not sure the book is truly about her at all. It's certainly not ONLY about Sadie.
2.) I'm not really certain what the true story is about, and the interesting thing is that it's told so well that I'm not sure I even care. Most of the time that really bothers me, a story that just seems to ramble on with no direction or end point in sight. Maybe that's just because of the expectation I had that the book was about Sadie's story, but it was much more than that. I believe it's the story of how we either let our circumstances dictate our choices, or let our choices dictate our circumstances. Every character in the book spoke to this in some way or another.

I believe this is a book that I will be thinking about in the months to come, and will certainly revisit.

What a fascinating story! I loved the time and place it was set in, it was so interesting to me! Because of that interest, this book had me and never let me go (only for a tea break). I felt connected to the townpeople and that is what makes this book so captivating! Also, the ending was unexpected!

This was an excellent book. I really couldn't wait to see how the life of the main character changed throughout the book.

If The Creek Don’t Rise was enjoyable. The writing style really made us feel the characters’ different emotions. I felt hatred, sadness and hopefulness. I am warning you that it won’t be for everyone! Thank you NetGalley for the free ebook.

http://readdayandnight.blogspot.com/2018/02/books-i-read-in-2017-part-2.html

I enjoyed this but I also felt like there were a lot of side stories that just disappeared. Each new narrator would go back and retell part of the story from their point of view then move the story along for the next narrator to take over, but a lot of them had their own unique stories that I wanted to know more of!

I enjoyed this book very much. A good book to settle down in a comfy cozy chair and lose yourself in.

Sadie Blue is raised by her grandmama in Baines Creek, a poverty-stricken one horse town in the middle of Appalachia. She gets pregnant by Roy Tupkin, and they have a whirlwind wedding. This does not bode well for Sadie however; Roy starts beating Sadie soon after getting married.

This book isn't necessarily about only Sadie though. It tells of the townspeople of Baines Creek as a whole, and goes into graphic detail the absolute poverty that they live with on a daily basis. And regardless of the trials and tribulations that these people experience, they don't take kindly to new people, no matter the intentions. When a new teacher, Kate Shaw, comes to town, she is met with resistance by the townspeople, especially the minister's sister, who tries to turn the whole town against her when she gleans that her brother may have taken a liking to Kate and the lift as she knows it may be coming to an end.

This story is filled with backwoods reality-dirt floors and outhouses, poverty and hunger, moonshine and a hometown 'shaman'. This is writing at its finest. I simply could not put this book down.

haunting; reminiscent (but not as dark) as Winter's Bone

Thank you for the chance to review this book, however, unfortunately, I was unable to read and review this title before it was archived.

I never thought I would enjoy this book because I've always been a huge young adult novel fan. I learned and realized a lot about the beauty and challenges of living an a small town. I love the writing style, it is new to me but I got the feels of it and found myself enjoying the whole book.