After seeing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, fourteen-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The events of this fateful summer will affect the entire town of Medgar, Kentucky.
Medgar is beset by a massive mountaintop removal operation that is blowing up the hills and back filling the hollows. Kevin's grandfather and others in town attempt to rally the citizens against the "company" and its powerful owner to stop the plunder of their mountain heritage. When Buzzy witnesses a brutal hate crime, a sequence is set in play that tests Buzzy and Kevin to their absolute limits in an epic struggle for survival in the Kentucky mountains.
I grew up about 30 miles outside of Washington, D.C. in what was then undeveloped country. It was a place of cornfields and tree houses, dammed-up creeks and secret swimming holes. In the summers, my brothers and I would dash out around 8:00 am for wherever and return just in time for dinner in the evening. It was a magical place to be a kid and I wanted to recapture that wonder of discovery as fourteen year-old Kevin explores his new surroundings in my debut novel The Secret Wisdom of the Eart…
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