Kindle Edition Amazon Melinda Clayton Category:  Historical Fiction Publisher: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC ISBN-10:  0989572927 Type: Fiction Pages: 226 Copyright: July 2013 ISBN-13: 9780989572927 Forty-four year old Beth Pritchett Sloan thought she'd escaped her tragic childhood, but now she has to face the truth. Beth Sloan has spent the majority of her life trying to escape the memories of a difficult childhood.  Born into the infamous Pritchett family of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, she grew up hard, surrounded not only by homemade stills and corn liquor, but by an impoverished family that more often than not preferred life on the wrong side of the law.  After the mysterious death of her brother Luke at the age of thirteen, seventeen year old Beth and her younger sister Naomi ran away from home, never to return.  As the years passed, Beth suppressed the painful memories and managed to create a comfortable, if troubled, life with her husband Mark and their two children in an upscale suburb outside of Memphis, Tennessee.  But the arrival of an unwelcome letter threatens to change all that. Against her better judgment, and at the urging of her sister Naomi, Beth agrees to return to Cedar Hollow, to the memories she’s worked so hard to forget.  When old resentments and family secrets are awakened, Beth must risk everything to face the truth about what really happened to Luke that long ago summer night.               Excerpt Chapter 1 Beth Pritchett Sloan The sun fades away in the west, and I pour myself a second glass of chardonnay, a pricier selection than my typical fare. We generally save the good stuff for company, but it’s been a particularly trying day. The decanter is slick with sweat, the chill long since faded. This does not bother me. As quickly as I’ll be emptying the bottle, it’s hardly worth rousing to trek to the refrigerator between glasses, and I long ago gave up the pretension of an ice bucket. I’ll drink it warm. Given long enough, I might even omit the goblet. I’ve not previously sunk to that level of intemperance, but the swift road to my decline has left me uncertain as to what my final destination might be. The image of me imbibing straight from the source no longer seems beyond the realm of possibility, though I’m not quite there yet. Replacing the bottle on the marbled windowsill with a satisfying thunk, I settle back into my overstuffed chair. It isn’t a comfortable seat, chosen more for looks than functionality, the upholstery scratchy and unyielding, bought in a moment of presumption. But it’s the only one that affords me the view I want. I have to crane my neck to the left and peer between the sprawling houses across the street, but if I angle my head just so, I can get a glimpse of the western sky. Vaguely, I wonder when the sunsets became so subdued. Dull pink, dirty yellow, in the distance the colors are smeared across the dingy Memphis sky like a vapid stain, and I have a fleeting memory of tattered clothing hanging from a line, blowing in the wind. The air is wet and heavy, dripping with the stifling humidity that rolls across town from the muddy waters of the Mississippi River. The window fogs in front of me, the droplets creating rivulets on the steamy glass. In my current state of mind, the whole world appears to be weeping. The flaming sunsets of my childhood had stretched across the West Virginia mountaintops as if painted by God himself, the hellfire and brimstone God I heard Brother Thomas Hudson, Jr. preach about down at the Cedar Hollow Baptist Church on the rare occasions my family occupied a pew. As a child, I took it literally when Brother Hudson spoke about his personal relationship with God. Observing the preacher’s deep creases and lines, I had assumed he and God were roughly the same age, though in retrospect the poor man was probably no older than I am now. As I tilt my head, savoring the taste of expensive wine as it slides down my throat, I’m amused at the memory of my childish interpretations. I haven’t thought of Brother Hudson in years, and for a fleeting instant I wonder if he’s still there, perched behind the pulpit, fist waving in indignation at the sinful nature of his parishioners. Of course he’s not; he’d be long dead by now. I swallow, leaning my head back against the rough upholstery, too disappointed in the faded sunset to risk the crick in my neck I’m sure to receive by seeking it out. There are a few things I miss from my childhood, and the sunsets are one of them. My family, however, is not. The letter in my lap lays like a weight across my thighs, pinning me down and holding me prisoner, wiping out any comfort I might have found from the wine. With the exception of my sister, I haven’t seen my family of origin in nearly twenty-seven years, not since Luke died. And now this.

Entangled Thorns and Healing the Pain, Shannon Yarbrough
In my review of Melinda Clayton's book Appalachian Justice, I compared her writing to the great Flannery O'Connor. If Flannery were alive today, she'd no doubt be reading Clayton's latest book called Entangled Thorns and singing its praises.

In it, Clayton returns to Cedar Hollow again (think Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County). Though the Platte clan from her previous books pay a visit, Clayton paints a portrait of a different family's woes, that of the Pritchett family--a gun toting, moonshine making, crass bunch (white trash and proud) led by their heavy-handed and abusive patriarch, Junior.

The story focuses on his two daughters, Beth and Naomi, who escaped the clutches both their father and the mountain town had on them by catching a train to Memphis shortly after their brother Luke died. And they never looked back. Naomi became a famous writer. Beth married and had children of her own, but still suffers from the demons of the bottle thanks to her family upbringing which required the children to be taste-testers of the 'shine until they turned 13.

When a hometown friend named Kay, also the owner of the only diner within fifty miles, writes to the two sisters to inform them their mother is dying and its time to make amends, the siblings plan a hesitant trip back to Cedar Hollow. Here, Beth and her own daughter, Marissa, face their own hardships, thirty year old family secrets are revealed, and the two sisters seek forgiveness with their aging mother.

Entangled Thorns is a gossipy grapevine of voices so true to small town backwoods and church pew chatter, but Clayton captures her characters' voices perfectly. The entire book is told in the first person point-of-view as chapters alternate between the voices of Beth, Naomi, their mother Geraldine, friend Kay, and Marissa.

It has the essence and Southern drawl of Cleo Threadgood sharing stories with Evelyn Couch in Fannie Flagg's Whistle Stop Cafe. We see the womanly bonds experienced amongst "steel magnolias" in the beauty shop of Truvy Jones. And we bask in the strong settings that were built from mountain sunsets, frog gigging, creek fishing, 'shine tasting, and cave dwelling that will have you reminiscing of a man named Mark Twain and the places he took his good ole boys Sawyer and Finn.

Most importantly, this is a book about family heritage - the strains from it we accept because they are in our blood and cannot be changed, the ghosts we ignore but who won't go away, and the past we wish not to repeat when we start a family of our own. As the title suggests, we sometimes become so entangled in the lives of our parents - whether that be an abusive father or a passive mother - and we try so hard to forget where we came from, that instead we forget who we are. And that's the beauty of a book like this, or any of Mrs. Clayton's books for that matter. It reminds us who we are.


A Classic from the First Word, Tracy Riva
I have rarely read a book that has moved me as much as Entangled Thorns has. It is a story of family honor, even when mistakenly given; of addiction; of dysfunction and strange as it may sound, of mountain pride and the strength of Appalachia.

In Entangled Thorns, Clayton once again brings readers into her fictional town of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, this time through several entirely new characters with ties to Cedar Hollow from a childhood now almost thirty years past. It is the story of two girls, Beth and Naomi, who ran away from Cedar Hollow when they were in their mid-teens, following the death of their brother. It is the story of the pain and the dysfunction they fled, a dysfunction that still exists back in the hollows of Appalachia, regardless of the coming our "modern age" and the enlightenment it has supposedly brought to these mountains. It is the story of anger, denial and the hope that you can rise above the circumstances into which you were born. And it is quite possibly the best book I have read, beating out the likes of James Michener, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Mark Twain though it lacks the epic proportions of many of those works. Like the books by these writers Entangled Thorns stands to be remembered as a classic that describes an era and a people too little understood. It describes the life lived in the mountains of Appalachia, among child abuse and moonshine accurately and without the blinders of illusion that so many writers put over it to romanticize an issue they have little understanding of. It is as real as can be and because of this it speaks to the heart and the soul in a way that only truth can.

It is fiction, pure and simple, but it is stunning fiction at its best. In the stories of Beth, Naomi and their families, both current families and family of origin, Clayton weaves a colorful, though not necessarily pretty, picture of mountain life. Amid stories of sleeping on the tin roof on nights when the creek would rise up into the yard, and fishing and catching lightning bugs, is the story of a family of moonshiners who put their children to work as testers when they were still toddlers and of the legacy of pain and alcoholism that left behind. It is a story of the ability of the human spirit to rise above circumstances and seek something better like a plant searching for sun, and it is the story of secrets that have the power to destroy us even years later.

This book is real, it is deep and it is touching in a way few books are. It earns my highest recommendation.