Big Stone Gap (2000)
By Adriana Trigiani
A friend recently handed me this book. I'd never heard of it, nor the author, but found the story very engaging. Ave Maria Mulligan has just lost her mother, turned 35, and decided love is not for here This is the late 1970s in Big Stone Gap, a small coal-mining community in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Ave Maria is the town's pharmacist, having inherited the business from her parents; she serves on the town's Rescue Squad and directs its local summer pageant, the one thing for which the town is celebrated. Life is predictable, peopled by a cast of memorable townspeople, including: Iva Lou (sexy librarian, who operates out of a bookmobile), Fleeter (Ave Maria's chain-smoking opinionated assistant); Pearl (Ave Maria's shy, high-school student part-time assistant), Theodore (conductor of the high school's stellar band and A-M's best friend), "Jack Mac" MacChesney (kind coal miner who grew up with A-M) and Otto and Worley (2 handyman brothers).
When Ave Maria meets with the lawyer handling her mother's estate, she is handed a letter that will change her life, changing what she thought she knew about her parents, and leading her to her late mother's family in Italy. Maybe she is not destined to always be the independent woman who disdains those who don't measure up to her standards. This is a sweet story that takes some good twists and turns.
I was happy to learn that the author wrote several sequels and that the story was made into a move in 2016. I want to see it!
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