This is a very endearing and memorable story and is highly engaging, I read through it relatively quickly, wavering between wanting to fly through the story and wanting to linger awhile. Ultimately, she does manage to bring small changes to the mountain people but, more importantly, she herself is changed. In the end, Christy decides to muddle through. Her initial reaction to the mission life was to flee and return home and she might very well have done so without the loving intervention of one Miss Alice, a woman who challenged Christy to determine what her true motivation were for taking the position in the first place.
The smells and lack of hygiene, for one thing, prove a shock to her system.
Christy herself comes from an affluent family and arrives unprepared for the harsh realities of the mountain folks. They are a self sufficient lot who aren't sure about the work Christy and others who work at the mission have come to do. In the story of Christy we are introduced to a backwoods people who are steeped in tradition, folklore and a proud history. Several characters in this book were based on people that Leonora Whitacker personally knew. Much of what the character of Christy experiences in this book are things which were experienced by Marshall's mother. Marshall said of this novel that it's about 75% historical fact with some fun fiction sprinkled around to make the story line a bit more interesting. The character of the teacher, Christy Huddleston, is based on Marshall's mother, Leonora Whitaker. I might be delayed in my reading goals by one year but I'm delighted to say that I finally did get around to reading it and that I loved it very much.įor those of you who are unaware of the story line, Catherine Marshall wrote a fictionalized tale of a young school teacher who travels to Cutter Gap, Tennessee in 1912 to teach in a mission schoolhouse. It was all very ridiculous, really, but eventually I decided to buy mass market paperback (like the one you see pictured here) in order to read it. I did not manage to read it at that time because I couldn't seem to locate a copy.
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