Schuyler Kaufman's Book Nook

REAL COUNTRY: From the Fast Track to Appalachia - Leslie Brunetsky

   Transplants to North Carolina's High Country will find Brunetsky's saga of City Girls Move To Mountains both fun, familiar, and intriguing. The tone instantly invites us to relax and chuckle through a five-and-a-half year transition from the Washington-Baltimore corporate jungle to a slower life in Happy Hollow.

   Without pounding it home, Brunetsky makes a subtle point about prejudice. She and her partner, Hope, expect to meet with bucolic prejudice against two unaccompanied women sharing a house. This expectation gets turned on its head, however, as Hope and Leslie see their very expectation of prejudice as in itself a form of prejudice.

   In Part I Brunetsky takes fewer than thirty pages to introduce us to herself (Leslie, who battles trouble with double-barreled jokes and a determined eye to the future), and Hope (the home-loving one who sees problems clearly and looks for solutions).

   In Part II Brunetsky switches her narrative to verbatim e-mails sent to friends left behind. These e-mails reflect centuries of Brunetsky ancestors' dependence on rueful laughter to get through trouble, from mass persecutions to stubbornly malfunctioning appliances. Our trepid but thoroughly game protagonists learn about slowing down, about country resourcefulness, about the Appalachian phrase "Git 'er done." Leslie and Hope leave behind lifelong corporate routines, and discover a world where work stops at five o-clock and the commute takes ten minutes; where the worst traffic jam is caused by a flock of ducks.

   Some endorsements on the back cover use words like "hilarious" and "side-splitting." I disagree. The humor of this story is so intricately knitted together with true insight that the laughs come from deep within, chuckling warmly, but not splitting your sides.

   Keep this book on the table next to a comfy couch, and read it at your own pace. You'll be glad you did.