Allegheny Dream
by Lisa Harris

Description

Every family’s past is Gettysburg, Eliza Schnable Friday discovers:  the battlefield of a legendary civil war where truth is the first casualty.  To rescue the wounded and bury the dead, Eliza must use every weapon in her arsenal—fierce devotion, uncompromising integrity, and regional pride.  Like Lee Smith’s Appalachian novels, Allegheny Dream alternates between a physical terrain of mountains and forests and an imaginary landscape lit by flashes of prophecy and echoing with ancestral voices. (Anthony Di Renzo)

Comments:

“Author Lisa Harris is a ferocious visionary whom William Blake would have hailed as a comrade in arms.  Wielding the bow of mercy and the arrows of desire, she wages wars of mutual benevolence, wars of love, to capture the bleeding heart of land and family.” (Anthony Di Renzo, author of Trinacria:  A Tale of Bourbon Sicily)

“Allegheny Dream, a family saga, is bulging with characters who manage to be both usual and unique–and totally believable, characters who will linger with you long after the book is back on the shelf. But the most important character, in one sense, is the Allegheny Mountain Range itself. Harris, in rich, luscious prose renders its history, culture, and soul and makes it impossible for you to ever drive through without saying, I know this place, I know these people.”

“This is a novel of heartbreaking beauty, shimmering as a jewel.  Lisa Harris gives us a deeply felt, deeply experienced novel about family secrets, the complexity of those intimate relationships that shape us and that, ultimately, if we are wise enough, offer salvation.  It is a tale of many generations and the mothers and daughters that carry both pain and love.  It is a tale as mysterious as the canals of Mars.  Lisa Harris writes with authority and with exquisite language.  This is a novel to read and reread, and she is a writer to be watched. ” (Jeanne Mackin, author of The Beautiful American)