Redemption Mountain
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this emotional debut from Gerry FitzGerald, a NY executive, restless in his success, is sent to W. Virginia and meets a small-town woman and her son who open his eyes to a richer life than he could have imagined.
On the surface, Charlie Burden and Natty Oaks could not be more different: She, the daughter of many generations of rural farmers; he, an executive at a multi-national engineering firm. But, in each other, they find the new lease on life they both so desperately need.
Natty dreams of a life beyond her small town. She is unhappily married to her high school crush (who now spends more time at the bar than at home) and passes the time nursing retired miners, coaching her son, The Pie Man's, soccer team and running the mountain trails she knows by heart, longing to get away from it all. Charlie has everything he ever thought he wanted, but after 25 years of climbing the corporate ladder, he no longer recognizes his own life: his job has become bureaucratic paper-pushing, his wife is obsessed with their country-club status, and his children have grown up and moved on. When he is sent to West Virginia to oversee a mining project, it is a chance to escape his stuffy life; to get involved, instead of watching from the sidelines. Arriving in Red Bone, though, he gets more than he bargained for: his new friends become the family he was missing and Natty, the woman who reminds him what happiness feels like. When his company's plans threaten to destroy Natty's family land, his loyalties are questioned and he is forced to choose between his old life and his new love in a fight for Redemption Mountain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Against the backdrop of rural West Virginia, Fitzgerald's accomplished first novel, originally self-published in 2009 as The Pie Man, tracks the improbable relationship between young Natty Oakes, a local "hillbilly" woman with the proverbial heart of gold, and Charlie Burden, a wealthy, college-educated, sophisticated Northeasterner with a strong moral compass. Both Natty and Charlie are dissatisfied with their married lives. Natty's shotgun marriage, already complicated by her firstborn son's Down syndrome, is upended when her husband's hubris and drinking quash his football career. Meanwhile Charlie, an executive with a New York engineering firm, has become uninterested in the superficial country-club life that still grips his socialite wife. When Charlie's firm sends him to the backwater town of Red Bone, W.Va., he's captivated by the area's natural beauty and unpretentious locals, not the least of whom are Natty and her son, called "Pie Man," with whom Charlie develops a sweet bond. Fitzgerald, an advertising pro, adeptly sells the duo's unlikely romance, and though the author can be didactic about the environmental effect of the mountaintop coal mining, his compelling take on the behind-the-scenes politics driving the area's energy industries is eye-opening.
