Special thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for gifting me with an advanced reading copy of The Creek Don't Rise by Leah Weiss.

Whoa! If you think you can handle it, you NEED to read this book! I started it and could not stop until I finished reading it!
The characters are so real! Preacher Eli Perkins with his caring and kind ways acts just as I think a man of the cloth would in similar circumstances. Birdie Rocas and Kathleen (Kate) Shaw certainly stimulate my curiosity.

Samuel was amazing! I know crows are intelligent, but Samuel 'takes the cake'.

Secrets! It seems that everyone is hiding something and keeping secrets. Some secrets are not as secret as the person thinks.

There's a lot of hurt!
My heart went out to dear sweet Sadie Blue!

5 shining stars

Baines Creek, high up in the Appalachian mountain, a poor place filled with impoverished people, a place where moonshine is king. A different style for the story telling in this as we hear from many of the people in this town and Sadie Blues own story is woven through the fabric of theirs. A very young, newly married pregnant woman, she vows her no good moonshining husband has beaten her for the last time. A preacher who hires a very different kind of woman than is usually found in these parts. A sister who is afraid of losing her brother and Sadie's grandmother and aunt, all tell their stories adding to Sadie's own. A young woman goes missing and has the town both fearful and wondering.

Gritty, southern story telling, these are tough people leading hard scrabbled lives. It is hard not to hope that Sadie will manage to overcome her misfortune and find some hope and success in creating a new and better life. She is the character we come to know the best, though just enough of the other characters stories are revealed to give us a glimpse of how and why they are living as they do now.

A first novel from a promising and insightful new author. Her writing reminds me of the author [author:Amy Greene|1256071].

ARC from Netgalley.
Publishes August 8th by Sourcebooks Landmark.

I liked this book a lot. The characters were realistic and it actually made me feel like I was in those mountains. I would love to know more about Kate and see what the future holds for Miss Sadie Blue.

I tried but did not finish this book. I just couldn't get interested in the story.

What an absolute gem of a book. It is impossible for me not to give it 5 stars.

When starting this I had braised myself for a dark read. This is not something I normally get drawn too, as Im quite sensitive of sensitive topics so to say. But the blurb and the cover on NetGalley.. I just couldn't let it go. I am so glad I got approved for this as it is now firmly in place on my favorites and 5 star shelf.

It is about all these sensitive topics such as abuse and meanness, but it is also equal amounts of hope and love. The beautifully written text manages to cast light on everything, and I couldn't put it down.

The book has a few heroes who's life we are following for a short time, as they come together in the middle of nowhere in rural America. I especially love the young pregnant Sadie Blue and Birdie the medicine woman in the woods. Beautiful women.

I enjoyed most of this story. The description implies that the story will be about Sadie Blue. We get three chapters from Sadie and nine chapters from other characters. Most of the other characters are interesting, but some of it just didn't seem to move the story along. I think my favorite was granny Gladys. Kinda reminded of the novel These Is My Words.
Thanks to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Landmark

I just can't resist sharing some of my favorite passages, minus quotation marks since they are from a pre-publication copy I obtained from the publisher via NetGalley.

~ I don't smile. No sir. Life's too shitty. For a old woman, it's more shit than I can shovel. I can't remember if I ever had a choice but to put one foot in front of the other and walk the line on a rocky road to nowhere. ~

The first thing that struck me about this debut, aside from writing that is an absolute delight, was that this Appalachian tale tells mostly of the resident women folk and the smattering of simply good people who live in Baines Creek, a remote mountain community. It seems most stories that are set in Appalachia have mean, nasty, law-breaking men as the main characters. Here Sadie stands out among the crowd of narrators, beaten beyond recognition and redemption; beaten down but stronger and wiser for it, as was her grandmother before her. These women aren't perfect by any means, but the mood of the story is such that we forgive them and understand. Even the three darkest characters have their backgrounds revealed so that we understand them too. Don't like them, but understand them, to an extent.

It is 1970 on the mountain, and the entire gamut of emotions is felt both there and in your heart as you read about this small town.
~ Sometimes I feel this old mountain breathing weary. The high thin air gets sucked deep into her lungs, all the way back to the start of time. I know her secrets and sins. This high place is hard on folks who give in or give up. For those who stay, Baines Creek is enough. ~

It really was enough for me these past few days to take a short trip there and spend time getting to know everyone. A real treat.

Thank you so much for being willing to grant me access to this book. Unfortunately, life obligations have prevented me from doing so. If my schedule clears, I plan on reviewing this in the future and will post the review on Amazon and Goodreads. Thank you.

The author renders through a set of strikingly vivid characters the life of a community in the fictional village of Baines Creek in the remote hollers of Appalachian North Carolina circa 1970. Our star is young teenaged Sadie, who tires of living with her flaky father and elopes with the wrong flashy dude, Roy, and soon gets pregnant. He turns out to be a moonshine runner who drinks too much of his product and unleashes his monstrous self in classic redneck ways, racist attitudes, and physical abusiveness. Sadie tries to live between crises with Roy while she works on a strategy to escape her situation. Along the way, she gets a lot of moral encouragement and hospitality from her elderly neighbor Marris, whose optimism may be excessive to some, but just what Sadie needs. She pays benevolence forward by helping the new teacher, Kate, get set up, and in turn gets an offer to teach her to read. Reverend Eli Perkins makes a balm for her soul and recognizes the evil in Roy and the evidence of his beatings, but he doesn’t have a practical answer for her. Another empathetic neighbor, the ancient and shaman-like Birdie, is wise in the ways of herbal medicine and solving human problems, despite the lunacy apparent in her hosting a crow’s nest in her hair. We wonder how all these good people in Sadie’s life are going to really help her out of her fix.

We spend time in the minds of these lively characters and learn how each has their own engaging story, which just happens to intersect with that of Sadie. Going into Roy’s perspective I suppose humanized him a bit, but likely not so pleasant an experience for most readers. The social sciences struggle to identify the fountains of resilience at the same time as they identify the lasting imprints of poverty and insecurities brought on by a hardscrabble life and periodic traumas (“Adverse Childhood Experiences” the current label). All the characters illustrate these principles in spades. The author of “Hillbilly Elegy” accounts for his resilience and ability to escape his tough life and traditions of his Kentucky clan as largely based on just enough nurturing love from some family members (for him a grandfather) and his luck in finding the right people (e.g. a special teacher) to provide timely help along his way. For Sadie here, her ability to create a virtual family seems promising to help her tap into some of that vital resilience, but nothing she does seems to keep Roy from getting more out of control.

The heroic actions of a girl in a rural community that has turned its back on stopping bullies engenders a lot of the same feeling I got from Woodrell’s “Winter’s Bone.” The need for some women’s juju and touches of magical realism for Sadie to succeed also reminds me of Hoffman’s “Practical Magic”. The creation of a virtual family to sustain a time of adversity and chaos bears some of the same revelations as Ward’s wonderful “Salvage the Bones.” By comparison with these stories, Weiss’ characters were their equal in their veracity, but I was disappointed that they didn’t progress much through their moral choices in life. Maybe Weiss plans to continue with the characters’ lives in future books. I longed to see the teacher Kate fully integrated into her adopted community, perhaps through some kind of romance with reverend Eli. I would certainly like to get more on the lives of these well wrought characters.

This book was provided for review by the publisher through the Netgalley program.

I must have clicked on this one by mistake. I'm not a fan of southern fiction. I won't review it since I barely got into it. thanks for the opportunity :)

It's bold, powerful, dark and hard to believe that this is a debut novel. In alternating first person narratives from a cast of characters that will be hard to forget, Leah Weiss took me to the mountain community called Baines Creek in the Appalachian Mountains in NC. And I mean took me there! From the present day of the story in 1970 to flashbacks of the past and dreams, these various points of view give us a vivid picture of this place and the people who live there. From the beginning, the first narrative of Sadie Blue, which broke my heart from the first page, it feels like it will be her story. She's seventeen, pregnant and two weeks into her marriage to Roy Tupkin, after enduring brutal beatings, Sadie knows she has made a mistake. The grit and darkness don't just belong to Sadie, though. Her grandmother Gladys tells us of her awful past ridden with the drunkenness and senseless abuse.

There's much more to the story with characters you will love and those you will hate. Eli Perkins, the preacher whose daddy took him to "see the devil" when he was nine years old is a good man wanting to help the community by bringing in a teacher who might stay. Kate Shaw is the woman who comes to teach because she wants to help as well as get a fresh start. There's Birdie Rocas , wise with a touch of eerieness about her who you can't help but love. There are secrets of revenge, secrets of identity, hidden stills and hidden feelings of the women who outwardly keep in their expected place as victims of marital abuse. I loved the dialect, the descriptions in phrases I would never have known but yet so perfectly describe an image or a feeling - "a pinch of sad" , "a slice of selfish that won't pretty". And omg - the ending - I wasn't expecting that . 5 stars and recommended especially to those who love Southern Literature.

I received an advanced copy of this book from SOURCEBOOKS Landmark through NetGalley.

What a book! Really enjoyed! Highly recommend. Perfect book club pick!

It's not often I have a sense of how much I'm going to like or despise a book from a single, opening sentence, but I did with this one. The opening line pulled me in. I held my breath and sent out a small prayer that this book wouldn't lose steam before it wound its way to the ending.

It really didn't, although there were a couple areas that kept me from outright calling this 5-star fare. I'll get to those later.

First, the teaser description: I was led to believe that this book followed the life of Sadie Blue, a 17-year-old Appalachian teenager, newly pregnant and married (not in that order), and it does. Kind of. Told in first person present tense, this novel is more of a character study, and hops around chapter to chapter to various character perspectives. Surprisingly, it was well-written enough that I didn't mind the various changes of POV (although a small handful didn't seem especially distinct, particularly closer to the book's end), nor did the first person narrative get irritating. Instead, I found it an effective way to distinguish (most of) the various character voices and really offer a full picture of this rural environment via the eyes of both locals and the outsider Kate Shaw, a newly arrived grade school teacher.

At the core of this story is indeed Sadie, a product of her time and place. She's received no formal childhood education, can't even read more than a couple words, but she possesses a willingness to learn and better herself. When Kate Shaw comes along, she also has a resource from whom to learn and blossom. Unfortunately, Sadie finds herself in the unenviable, but sadly all too common, position of being her new husband's punching bag. Even with today's laws against domestic violence, this happens all too frequently. In 1970s Appalachia, it's almost standard. We see the residents in this fictional town of Baines Creek through the eyes of Sadie, her grandmother, a friend of the family, the town reverend, Kate Shaw, and even Sadie's abusive husband, among others. There's no overt mention of the time period (although I believe the teaser indicated the decade so I had some context before jumping into this), and it took me awhile to realize that sometimes when a new chapter began we backtracked in time and replayed it through another character's eyes, which was a little confusing (and part of the reason I think this doesn't quite hit the full 5-star rating). The ending was also somewhat predictable and a little abrupt. It could've been more fleshed out for a fuller emotional impact.

That said, the prose worked for me. I loved the descriptions, and alternating from rural vernacular to Kate Shaw's and the reverend's more comprehensible speech patterns kept the book from being too much of a drudge into tedious colloquialisms. It was fascinating to step into a time and place that had shades of a dystopian setting, even though it is very much a real location that stands outside of modern society's temporal confines. This story also fueled my online search for more articles and photos depicting Appalachia, and the characters stayed with me long after I finished the last chapter. That's all I can really ask for in a novel.

I sincerely hope Weiss publishes more stories (and that NetGalley is kind enough to provide me with their ARCs so I can lose myself in more of Weiss' lush prose).

WOW!!!! This is an amazing book! I couldn't put the book down once I picked it up. The book is set in the 1970s. It's the story of teen bride Sadie Blue. She's newly married to Roy Tupkin who repeatedly abuses her in just the 15 days of their marriage.

Sadie Blue soon realizes she should have listened to those who told her he was no good. She's stuck in her small town of Baines Creek, North Carolina and her only joy is listening to Loretta Lynn. When a stranger arrives and completely turns the town upside down, Sadie realizes there's more to life than being Roy's wife living in moonshine territory.

If the Creek Don't Rise is a powerfully written story of small town life.

This book, while could have been set at any time in history was set in the 1970s and tells the story of 17 year old Sadie Blue who finds herself pregnant and in an abusive relationship. But it is also a story of the strength of people who have so little and especially the bonds between the women who endure so much.

I had a lot of problems with this book. The main one being the portrayal of the south and the southerners. Every character was bitter and there was nothing but struggle. It is sad to see an author write such a stereo type. Overall I did not like this book.

I have been very fortunate to have good relationships in my life, so I can't relate, but I can't help but feel for Sadie Blue. This book does deal with some heavy themes; her life definitely isn't easy. It was an experience to "travel" to that time period, and read the interactions between people. I liked that the chapters were told from different character's points-of-view as well, and I liked their back stories & insight into their thoughts.

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy of this novel.

The fact that this book is written by a debut author is astounding to me. IF THE CREEK DON'T RISE is one of the best books I have read in a very long time, and I read A LOT, so this is a huge compliment.

Leah Weiss truly has a gift and I predict that this book will find itself on bestseller lists all over the United States and in Canada and it deserves to be there.

The way the small settlement is described makes it come alive for the reader, you can almost feel short of breath from the thin mountain air and feel the crunch of the leaves under your feet as you walk alongside the characters on the wooded paths.

The way each character is described makes the reader feel as if they know them. You will want to go search your closets to drop off extra clothes and blankets to drop off to some of the poorer families. In fact, you will start to think about all that you have, and just how lucky you are.

You will be inspired by the priest who tends to his small congregation and despite all proof that their lives will never change, he holds onto hope and onto the belief that things can and will get better. He is an inspiring character.

It is actually amazing just how wonderfully and thoroughly readers will come to care about the various people in the book, and not just one or two of them, you will come to care about the entire community.

In short, this book is freakin' fabulous. I rate it as 5 out of 5 stars but if it were possible to rate it higher, I would.

This is a MUST READ book that readers will not soon forget.

The story focuses on a handful of locals in the small mountain community of Baines Creek, Appalachia, North Carolina. It is a hash and hard life there. A poor community with a core of people who are willing to help those deserving of it.

Preacher Eli Perkins travels through the community swapping jokes and sharing food. He is the polar opposite of his spinster sister Prudence, who doesn’t seem to have a kind bone in her body. She is a bitter and resentful woman. Then there is Marris Jones, who is eternally good-hearted, charitable, helpful, understanding and willing to go out of her way to be understanding. The local healing woman Birdie Rocas, some are scared of her and think she is a witch. Probably something to do with Samuel the crow who hitches a ride in her hair, but she has a vast knowledge of plant, herbs and medicines as well as poisons. She keeps a journal of things that happen on the mountains, she is a keeper of folklore and natural wonders. The newly appointed teacher Kate Shaw, who on arrival learns more from the locals than she teaches. But as the mountain has accepted her, so do the people. But she has found a place where she feels she can settle and manages to find a place for herself.

Then there is the grumbling Gladys Hicks. She is the Grandmother of Sadie Blue. Gladys took Sadie in after her father had died, and left parentless. She thinks she is world wise but is very naive. Her world comes crashing down around her when her husband Roy Tupkin starts beating her after they have been married on ly fifteen days. Gladys know Roy is trouble, but Sadie will not listen to her.

This story is very well written, with some very unique characters and their histories. The way the people live, or I should say the way some people just exist gives a great depth to this story. It shows how poor and destitute family’s are, children with no shoes and wearing burlap sacks. If you think this is going to be a sad and depressing story, you will be wrong. It shows how people with a simple existence have a rich community spirit for those deserving of it. I know that would never feed them, but the goodwill and grace of others will.

It gets straight in at the beginning, with Sadie being beaten up by Roy, but that is just the hook, after that the story almost strolls along, but it still maintains its grip on the reader. I would definitely recommend this book to readers.