Entangled Thorns Cedar Hollow Series Book 3 eBook Melinda Clayton
Download As PDF : Entangled Thorns Cedar Hollow Series Book 3 eBook Melinda Clayton 
Beth Sloan has spent the majority of her life trying to escape the memories of a difficult childhood. Born into the infamous Pritchett family of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, she grew up hard, surrounded not only by homemade stills and corn liquor, but by an impoverished family that more often than not preferred life on the wrong side of the law.
After the mysterious death of her brother Luke at the age of thirteen, seventeen year old Beth and her younger sister Naomi ran away from home, never to return. As the years passed, Beth suppressed the painful memories and managed to create a comfortable, if troubled, life with her husband Mark and their two children in an upscale suburb outside of Memphis, Tennessee.
But the arrival of an unwelcome letter threatens to change all that.
Against her better judgment, and at the urging of her sister Naomi, Beth agrees to return to Cedar Hollow, to the memories she’s worked so hard to forget. When old resentments and family secrets are awakened, Beth must risk everything to face the truth about what really happened to Luke that long ago summer night.
Entangled Thorns Cedar Hollow Series Book 3 eBook Melinda Clayton
In my review of Melinda Clayton's book Appalachian Justice, I compared her writing to the great Flannery O'Connor. If Flannery were alive today, she'd no doubt be reading Clayton's latest book called Entangled Thorns and singing its praises.In it, Clayton returns to Cedar Hollow again (think Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County). Though the Platte clan from her previous books pay a visit, Clayton paints a portrait of a different family's woes, that of the Pritchett family--a gun toting, moonshine making, crass bunch (white trash and proud) led by their heavy-handed and abusive patriarch, Junior.
The story focuses on his two daughters, Beth and Naomi, who escaped the clutches both their father and the mountain town had on them by catching a train to Memphis shortly after their brother Luke died. And they never looked back. Naomi became a famous writer. Beth married and had children of her own, but still suffers from the demons of the bottle thanks to her family upbringing which required the children to be taste-testers of the 'shine until they turned 13.
When a hometown friend named Kay, also the owner of the only diner within fifty miles, writes to the two sisters to inform them their mother is dying and its time to make amends, the siblings plan a hesitant trip back to Cedar Hollow. Here, Beth and her own daughter, Marissa, face their own hardships, thirty year old family secrets are revealed, and the two sisters seek forgiveness with their aging mother.
Entangled Thorns is a gossipy grapevine of voices so true to small town backwoods and church pew chatter, but Clayton captures her characters' voices perfectly. The entire book is told in the first person point-of-view as chapters alternate between the voices of Beth, Naomi, their mother Geraldine, friend Kay, and Marissa.
It has the essence and Southern drawl of Cleo Threadgood sharing stories with Evelyn Couch in Fannie Flagg's Whistle Stop Cafe. We see the womanly bonds experienced amongst "steel magnolias" in the beauty shop of Truvy Jones. And we bask in the strong settings that were built from mountain sunsets, frog gigging, creek fishing, 'shine tasting, and cave dwelling that will have you reminiscing of a man named Mark Twain and the places he took his good ole boys Sawyer and Finn.
Most importantly, this is a book about family heritage - the strains from it we accept because they are in our blood and cannot be changed, the ghosts we ignore but who won't go away, and the past we wish not to repeat when we start a family of our own. As the title suggests, we sometimes become so entangled in the lives of our parents - whether that be an abusive father or a passive mother - and we try so hard to forget where we came from, that instead we forget who we are. And that's the beauty of a book like this, or any of Mrs. Clayton's books for that matter. It reminds us who we are.
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Entangled Thorns Cedar Hollow Series Book 3 eBook Melinda Clayton Reviews
As usual, author Melinda Clayton tackles important societal issues in Entangled Thorns, but this time her characters seem more predictably formed and less personably engaging as they reveal their choices and work through their residual traumas.
I wanted to feel sympathy and compassion for Beth and the undoubted crisis that drove her from Cedar Hollow, but she seemed more like a flat alcoholic housewife than a driven survivor from the time I met her over that first glass of chardonnay all the way past the bottle hidden in her suitcase. I wanted to believe Naomi had dealt with her childhood and triumphed as I first encountered her coping with a voice beckoning her back into her forgotten past, but as she re-entered the timewarp she'd left so many decades before, her reaction remained flat, without any real curiosity or fear. I wanted to understand Geraldine more as I learned about her constrictive childhood and teenaged rebellion, but subsequent excusing scenes kept her behaviors flat and less than revealing.
As the sisters reunited to return to their origins and the uncertain reunion with their mother, each brought less of their past and present and more of a stereotypical persona than I'd come to expect from the population of Cedar Hollow. The unfolding tale revealed unique imperfections, crises, and challenges like so many Cedar Hollow families embody, but the sisters, their mother, and Beth's daughter and husband seemed to navigate too smoothly through the obstacles toward their happily-ever-after intentions; their pasts warranted more effort and less certainty.
Before the resolution, I expected a sense that they had each and all fully faced the ugly wounds inflicted not just by the ghosts haunting their past but also by the pervading taint of their own obscuring choices. I wanted to see the family not only deal with the pain of their arrested potential, cut short in the long-gone crisis, but also to commit together to grow beyond it to make the future something the past could never have contemplated let alone created. I wanted more interaction of the family and less external observation; I wanted more actual resolution and less wishful intention; I wanted more reality and less lingering fantasy.
Nonetheless, Entangled Thorns is worth reading for its absorbing story vividly set in an alien world where moonshine eclipsed humanity. Author Melinda Clayton has given dimension and character to a multifaceted tragedy. While the family rebonding is plausible, simply sharing a comprehensive overview of the precipitating drunken tragedy would realistically be only the start of the interplay necessary to heal the devastating, ongoing, and indirect effects of their subsequent choices. 225 pages doesn't seem to have been enough to give these characters the depth they and their outplaying dilemma deserved.
By accident I started reading Melinda Clayton’s Cedar Hollow series out of order, but it didn’t reduce the experience for me in the slightest. After the well-defined characters, what I like most about this series is how the sense of place becomes a character as well. It feels especially powerful in Entangled Thorns. I can almost smell Rugged Creek and feel the shock of the cold water and hear the whine of the mosquitos. The vegetation, the land, the very humidity in the air…I can practically taste it. And yet it doesn’t become overwhelming or feel like too much detail. I know when I start highlighting passages on my about the quality of the sunsets or the texture of the night skies, it’s something I’ll be hard pressed to put down.
This book is an intense, skillfully meted out narrative about two sisters who escaped Cedar Hollow in their teens and then lost touch. Now, with their mother in poor shape, they are summoned home, and must decide whether to return and face the horrors they’d fled. And the different women they’ve become.
Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a story if the sisters didn’t return. Chapter by chapter, the characters reveal their lives, their thoughts, and pulled me in deeper and deeper. Right to that place where I needed to keep reading to find out what happens next.
I really liked the care Ms. Clayton used in making the characters unique and compelling. Even the minor characters, like Beth’s husband, Mark, were fleshed out in a way that held a mirror up to the protagonists, showing bits previously hidden.
Looking forward to reading the second book next, and I’m looking forward to more after that. (I hope there will be more!)
In my review of Melinda Clayton's book Appalachian Justice, I compared her writing to the great Flannery O'Connor. If Flannery were alive today, she'd no doubt be reading Clayton's latest book called Entangled Thorns and singing its praises.
In it, Clayton returns to Cedar Hollow again (think Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County). Though the Platte clan from her previous books pay a visit, Clayton paints a portrait of a different family's woes, that of the Pritchett family--a gun toting, moonshine making, crass bunch (white trash and proud) led by their heavy-handed and abusive patriarch, Junior.
The story focuses on his two daughters, Beth and Naomi, who escaped the clutches both their father and the mountain town had on them by catching a train to Memphis shortly after their brother Luke died. And they never looked back. Naomi became a famous writer. Beth married and had children of her own, but still suffers from the demons of the bottle thanks to her family upbringing which required the children to be taste-testers of the 'shine until they turned 13.
When a hometown friend named Kay, also the owner of the only diner within fifty miles, writes to the two sisters to inform them their mother is dying and its time to make amends, the siblings plan a hesitant trip back to Cedar Hollow. Here, Beth and her own daughter, Marissa, face their own hardships, thirty year old family secrets are revealed, and the two sisters seek forgiveness with their aging mother.
Entangled Thorns is a gossipy grapevine of voices so true to small town backwoods and church pew chatter, but Clayton captures her characters' voices perfectly. The entire book is told in the first person point-of-view as chapters alternate between the voices of Beth, Naomi, their mother Geraldine, friend Kay, and Marissa.
It has the essence and Southern drawl of Cleo Threadgood sharing stories with Evelyn Couch in Fannie Flagg's Whistle Stop Cafe. We see the womanly bonds experienced amongst "steel magnolias" in the beauty shop of Truvy Jones. And we bask in the strong settings that were built from mountain sunsets, frog gigging, creek fishing, 'shine tasting, and cave dwelling that will have you reminiscing of a man named Mark Twain and the places he took his good ole boys Sawyer and Finn.
Most importantly, this is a book about family heritage - the strains from it we accept because they are in our blood and cannot be changed, the ghosts we ignore but who won't go away, and the past we wish not to repeat when we start a family of our own. As the title suggests, we sometimes become so entangled in the lives of our parents - whether that be an abusive father or a passive mother - and we try so hard to forget where we came from, that instead we forget who we are. And that's the beauty of a book like this, or any of Mrs. Clayton's books for that matter. It reminds us who we are.
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