Dig Too Deep

This book had twists and turns along the way and I wasn't sure how it was going to end at all.

The unraveling of what had happened to her sister was compelling and I liked the switching between the two sisters in telling the story.

I would definitely want to read this author again.

I didn’t know what to expect from this book when I picked it up, but i was quickly thrown into a world of corruption and lies that was impossible to put down. I was thrilled to find a fantastic YA with compelling characters and an engrossing plot.

While some events a found a little unrealistic, I was deeply engrossed with the main plot. It reminded me at times of a teenage Erin Brockovich, though admittedly Liberty has much less power and credibility. I enjoyed the book from start to finish.

If you want a book with spunk, and a determined teenager trying to fight for justice in a place where her voice is ignored, then this is just the book for you.

This book deals with a lot of issues related to mountaintop removal mining in rural Kentucky. When Liberty Briscoe arrives in Ebbotsville, she immediately has concerns as to how the mine is affecting the town's water, and therefore their health. Her grandmother isn't well, and she's not the only one. Other residents see Liberty as an outsider, because she has spent most of her childhood in Washington, DC, and is only in town temporarily. No one takes her seriously, and she is told to stay out of their business. Liberty's persistence to help people who don't seem to care about their own town makes her a strong and likable character.

One thing I think Ms. Allgeyer did well was present multiple sides of the problem. Several characters had solid reasons for not wanting the mine to be shut down in spite of the possible risks involved in keeping it open. Characters were multilayered, and often very different from Liberty's first impressions of them.

Woven throughout the book is also a family story, which explores the complex feelings of a teenager who is trying to assert her independence from her mother. She's also struggling to keep up her grades while caring for an ailing grandmother and battling for a cause she's only just learning about. The whole book had a range of emotions, and I felt for Liberty as she experienced them.

Due to the complex ethical issues and some sexual content in this story, I would recommend it to older teens.

Loved this! it felt modern, timely and dealt with serious issues in a way that's accessible to teenagers. It made my list of 'best books I've read in 2015' even though it's a 2016 release. I really hope it gets an Australian publisher.

Super gripping and well-written with believable characters! The story might be fictional, but the situation of people being the victims of environmental justice issues from coal mining are totally real, so I really learned a lot from this book and thought it handled the topic well in a serious, yet not-preachy way. The main character and pacing were perfect.

At first I wasn't sure I would enjoy this book as judging from the cover it doesn't look that exciting and when I read the blurb , I was a little bit more intrigued but then again I'm not really into the whole environmental side of things . However I loved Dig Too Deep as it turned out to be fast-paced and a mystery of sorts with nasty villians with their hands too deep into the pockets of others and a whole town slowly dying due to the water. Dig too Deep tells the story of a seventeen year old girl who had to lose her scholarship and move in with her Nana in a small mountain town when her mother - an activist ended up in prison after a bomb went off at one of her protests. Liberty has always resented her mother for not being there for her when she needs her and putting her causes first, but Liberty will soon realise that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree when she arrives in town and discovers her Nana's water is bright orange and her Nana has stage 4 cancer. After a bit more research, Liberty notices a pattern that a few of the elderly have been dying and more are sick and she knows it has to do with the new mine operating. The thing is though that when Liberty tries to stop it , bad things happen from burning sheds to hurt loved ones . Can Liberty with the help of a few locals stop the Mine once and for all and do the town the favour the need or will it be too late to do anything about it ?

Find out in Dig Too Deep which was a fast-paced Teen Fiction Environmental Mystery and one of those books where it doesn't pay to judge by the cover as it turned out to be an interesting and amazing insight to environmental cover-ups and actually gets you thinking that this is a common occurence and how many thousands of incidents like this have happened over years in different parts of the world.

Welcome to another session of Turning Pages!

Synopsis: Liberty's junior year just cracked wide open and catapulted her out on the ground. Her mother - a placard-carrying, species-saving, liberal-agenda-advancing, chronic protestor - is currently under guard at the Pender Women's Correction's Institute. A car bomb, which injured five people, went off at her last demonstration, and while Liberty's mother swears she's innocent of involvement, the judge isn't letting her go without a little more proof than just her word. Bad enough that Liberty's spent days, sometimes weeks not even seeing her mother, making her own meals and paying the utilities bills at the apartment because her mother is too involved with her causes to remember, but now she's discovered that her mother has spent the college money her grandparents had saved up for her on yet another one of her causes, and Liberty is BEYOND finished with her. Calling her "my former mother," and moving on with her life to save her sanity seems the best option. Packed off from their DC apartment and her private school, which offers Comparative Religions, Anthropology and German III, to her Granny Briscoe's farm and the local high school in rural Plurd County, Appalachia, where "coal mining keeps the lights on," Liberty's life and dream of early admission to Georgetown are faded, distant memories.

Things in Ebbottsville are a lot different than Liberty remembers - for one thing, the tap water's bright orange. Though the neighbor boy she ran around with when they were small turned out to be simply gorgeous, there's not a lot else to recommend the place. The underfunded high school, staring townspeople, rusted junker cars, and endless underage partying going on in the back hollers are just background noise to the stark reality of food stamps, buying bottled water, and too few resources on the Briscoe farm. Liberty's reality now includes a grandmother who is thin, stooped, and coughing up blood, half a mountain visible from her grandparent's property, the top removed to mine the mountain for coal, and the effects of the mining a poison blighting the creek, the hills, and the ground. Mining is killing Ebbotsville, Kentucky and the Briscoe Farm -- and it turns out that mining -- may be responsible for killing Liberty's Granny, too. Is there really anything one poor person can do to stop a rich person bent on making more profit from his crooked business practices? Liberty aims to find out. Suddenly being a placard-carrying, species-saving, liberal-agenda-advancing protestor doesn't sound half bad. But, is there a point at which a person should stop tilting at windmills? When are the costs of fighting the good fight too high? And, what happens to a community if whistleblowers dig too deeply for the truth?

Observations: The minute I read about water coming out orange from the tap, and the number of sick and out-of-work people in town, I knew this was a story that was "ripped from the headlines" as it were. My thoughts immediately went to other whistleblowers in history, and the situation in Flint, Michigan.

I'm so conflicted on how to rate this book. It's on a subject you don't hear much about (especially in YA novels), MTR Mining, and it incorporates it in such a seamless way that you have to wonder why it DOESN'T get talk about more?

Setting is a character in this deeply interesting novel, and you get wrapped up in the sense of where you are more than you get a sense of Liberty's character. You can feel the power behind her frustration at her situation (being in a new place despite not wanting to be, all because your activist mom decided to get herself arrested), and the slow shift behind her eventually becoming just like her mom, and becoming involved in the Kentucky town to help figure out the water crisis.

However, the majority of Liberty's interactions are with people who are older than her, and I didn't get the sense that this was really a young adult novel. It feels more like an adult novel about a teenager -- the focus isn't necessarily on Liberty in the way that it could be.

But that isn't altogether terrible. In fact, teens could feel a lot of connection to this given the clean water crises in Flint, Michigan, and all over Native American reservations across the country. This is a good spark for a long line of social justice oriented stories that are piquing the interest of young people everywhere.

Amy Allgeyer wrote a strong novel that I think teens might have a difficult time relating to or picking up (the story itself isn't altogether very "wow!" or "i NEED to read this!") but if they do, it's something that'll stir even the smallest amount of justice in their stomachs.

This is such an interesting book and something that I generally don't know much about. Basically as far as I know, most of the time big corporations wreck the environment but I had no idea the depth of the damage they could do.

Liberty is living in her grandmother's tiny town since her mom is in prison, and it'd be horrible enough except that things are really weird: the water is orange. Not a little rusty, actually orange. Bright orange. And the government is like, "Nope, TOTALLY FINE to drink."

Except a lot of people have cancer...including, now, Liberty's grandmother.

And so Liberty decides that she's going to get to the bottom of it, even though everyone is against her. (The mine that may or may not* have polluted the water is the biggest employer in the town, and no one wants to risk losing their jobs. So they view this outsider asking questions and causing trouble as a major threat.)

But Liberty's not giving up; it's the only thing she can do to help her grandmother.

Recommended.

* = Okay, of COURSE they polluted the water.

Corrupt coal company blasted by teen activist

What’s in rural Appalachia in Eastern Kentucky? Liberty’s grandmother for one. For another, an unholy mess created by man’s greed. Liberty is looking for a place where she’ll receive cell-phone reception so she climbs the ridge from Granny’s house in the hollow. Once she reaches the top, she’s aghast at what she sees, or more exactly what she doesn’t see. She narrates, “Tanner’s Peak. The whole top of the freaking mountain … it’s just gone.” On top of discovering that the mountaintop removal was done by the coal company, Peabody’s Mining, she notices the color of Granny’s water is like a neon orange. Then, even though her grandmother’s demeanor is as spunky as ever, she’s visibly weaker. And, she’s coughing up blood.

With her mother more out of the picture than in and finally arrested, seventeen-year-old Lib had no choice but to move to Ebbotsville, KY to stay with her grandmother. From years before, she remembers only a handful of people living there, one being Cole, the boy with the dimples and the crooked grin. He introduces her to the wrong crowd.

Amy Allgeyer has proved herself to be a strong writer with an uncanny ability to create unique characters, both those you will love and those you will loathe. I adored the spunky personality of Lib’s grandmother, and applauded Lib’s courage and determination. While the story is a bit predictable, it is presented with emotion and the plot flows effortlessly from start to finish. This is teen fiction (12 – 18) that can be enjoyed by all ages.

Fictionzeal

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

3.5 stars

Dig Too Deep Amy Allgeyer Albert Whitman & Company, April 2016 ISBN 9780-8075-1580-8 Hardcover

From the publisher—

With her mother facing prison time for a violent political protest, seventeen-year-old Liberty Briscoe has no choice but to leave her Washington, DC, apartment and take a bus to Ebbottsville, Kentucky, to live with her granny. There she can finish high school and put some distance between herself and her mother– her ‘former’ mother, as she calls her. But Ebbottsville isn’t the same as Liberty remembers, and it’s not just because the top of Tanner’s Peak has been blown away to mine for coal. Half the county is out of work, an awful lot of people in town seem to be sick, and the tap water is bright orange–the same water that officials claim is safe to drink. When Granny’s lingering cold turns out to be something much worse, Liberty is convinced the mine is to blame, and starts an investigation that quickly plunges her into a world of secrets, lies, threats, and danger. Liberty isn’t deterred by any of it, but as all her searches turn into dead ends, she comes to a difficult decision: turn to violence like her former mother or give up her quest for good.

I tend to shy away from any novel that seems as though the author might have an agenda of some sort and I admit to being a little leery of Dig Too Deep for that reason since it seemed clear that environmental issues would be front and center. There was something about it, though, that appealed to me, mostly the apparent dichotomy between mother and daughter, so I decided to take a chance and I’m glad I did.

Yes, the damage that can be done in coal mining is a very important element of this book but I actually found my connection to be more with the changes that take place in Liberty because of those environmental issues. From a girl who heartily resents her mother for placing her causes above her daughter, Liberty gradually becomes her mother in a fashion once she begins to understand the harm being done to her granny and the community.

The community is the other thing that particularly struck me and the author does a masterful job of bringing the locale to life. I’ve spent time in coal country and Ms. Allgeyer gets it right, evoking a strong sense of the deep poverty but also the haunting beauty. She also has a fine hand in making the reader feel the people’s devotion and loyalty to each other and the land and her characterization of Granny in particular is vivid and appealing.

As for the central story, the greed and moral corruption of the company’s management is obvious and certainly easy to paint as evil but I did think it was a bit overdone. There’s no doubt that Big Business can be very much on the dark side but I felt not enough attention was paid to what could happen to the community, to the people’s livelihoods, if the company were forced to make dramatic, expensive changes. I’m not saying the environmental problem should be ignored—far from it—just that all potential consequences need to be considered and planned for.

Whatever my concerns might be, Ms. Allgeyer is clearly a talented writer and has given readers a compelling story. I’m interested to see what she’ll offer next.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, April 2016.

Dig Too Deep by Amy Allgeyer is a young adult novel. Liberty Briscoe has to leave Washington, D.C. because her mother, Jamie is in jail. The trial will not be for approximately fourteen months. Liberty is going to her grandmother’s home in Ebbottsville, Kentucky. Granny is happy to see Liberty (it has been a few years since they last saw each other). Liberty finds that her grandmother is not well. She also finds that their water is orange. Peabody Mining Company has decimated a nearby mountain and are destroying the local water (Granny uses well water). Granny states that Robert Peabody had the water tested and the company said it was okay to drink (did you notice who paid for the testing). Liberty takes Granny to the doctor and finds out that Granny has cancer (already stage four). Granny is not the only townsperson who is ill. It seems that many people on the Eastern side of the mountain (with well water) are ill and quite a few are dead. Liberty starts investigating. She is determined to get the mine shut down. However, Robert Peabody (and people who support him) are against Liberty’s digging. Then a shed catches on fire at Briscoe Farm. This is just the start. Liberty will not be stopped. Who will win the battle?

When I started reading Dig Too Deep, I thought it was going to be another young adult book with a girl hooked on a boy (there is some of that), but Dig Too Deep has much more. The novel drew me in and held my interest until the end (for the most part). I am not sure that Dig Too Deep is giving the right message to young adults about how to handle such matters, but I do like the ending of the novel. I give Dig Too Deep 4 out of 5 stars. Please be aware that there is a scene in the book where there is violence to a dog (fair warning).

I received a complimentary copy of Dig Too Deep from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Dig Too Deep by Ally Allgeyer (release date 5th April 2016)

Move over Erin Brokovitch, Liberty Briscoe's in town and she's angry, dedicated and very clever. When her mum is wrongfully imprisoned for violent political activity, Liberty is forced to move from WQashington DC to Ebbottsville Kentucky. to live with her granny. However when she arrives she finds that the top of Tanner's Peak has been blasted away for coal production, the drinking water is neon orange and her granny, as well as many other Ebbottsville residents, is seriously ill. This is a Young Adult legal type thriller that could easily rival a John Grisham novel. It's got heart, strong characters and a really good storyline. Highly recommended by The Crime Warp

This surprisingly straightforward plot does an excellent job of tackling such a complex ecological and societal issue as mining. This Appalachian town, while somewhat cliched, is a solid portrayal of the economic dependence and health and environmental devastation of current mining techniques. Allgeyer does a good job of maintaining tension and holding the reader's interest without much in the way of physical description. And while the characterization may rely a little too heavily on the transliteration of southern accents, its still a fascinating read. One I'd be wiling to put in the hands of the right teen reader.