In the Coal Mine Shadows
   

In the Coal Mine Shadows

by Sarah Martin Byrd

Genres: Fiction

ISBN: 9781620206317

352 pages

Price: $16.99

After a coal mine explosion kills her father in 1922, pretty little Mary Margaret “Mame” Blackwell is not willing to accept her mother’s hardscrabble plan for farming burley tobacco in rural West Virginia, but trying to survive in a nearly deserted coal mining town without a father in the early 1900s is anything but easy. Mame yearns for a way out of the sleepy little town of Beckley.
When Mame eagerly leaves home on her first trip to Charleston at age 19, she meets tobacco heir Clint Paddington and sees her chance to move up in the world. Unaware at first of their families’ shared connection to tragedy, Mame makes wild, naïve choices that expose both families to even deeper dangers for generations to come.
Watch the damage escalate in this gritty Southern saga as ambition and romance go awry, adding betrayal, kidnapping, rape, and even murder to the mining tragedy. Do children inherit the sins of their fathers? Do dark forces walk the earth? Will Mame’s secrets push her to madness? Or will her solid roots in the coal mining country help her survive her mistakes, or, at least, be forgiven of them?

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About

Born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Sarah early on learned her way around the tobacco fields and creek beds hidden within. Her hard-working father drove her to excel at her endeavors, so when the death of a treasured friend at a young age triggered Sarah’s desire to write, her poem “The Black Car” became the starting point of her writing journey.
After a few different careers and several decades, In the Coal Mine Shadows is the first novel Sarah began writing, twenty-five years in the making. Sarah’s second novel, Guardian Spirit, was originally published September 15, 2010, by Lucky Press in Athens, Ohio. Since then, she has also written two other novels, The Color of My Heart and The River Keeper, as well as a children’s picture book titled The Manger Mouse, all published by Ambassador International in Greenville, South Carolina.
Sarah resides in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains with her husband of forty years. Her best friends are her only daughter, Wendy, and granddaughter, Emma.