To Make My Bread follows the McClure family during the years 1900-1929.  Initially, they are mountaineers, self-sufficient on their small plot of land.  Most of their neighbors live as they do, except for the Swains, who own the store in their community.  When the family is swindled out of their land by timber speculators, they move to a mill town forty miles away.

Not all family members adjust to the move.  The two younger children, John and Bonnie become the primary breadwinners, and they are radicalized by their experiences. Bonnie also struggles with the conflict between the demands of industrialized work and traditional expectations for women.  She becomes an important figure in the nascent labor movement in the town.

Part family saga, part political novel, To Make My Bread is one of six novels from the 1930s  based on the Gastonia textile strike of 1929.  The book has been the subject of academic study, and it is still in print from the University of Illinois Press.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: October 13th, 2009 under 1930-1939, 1932, Gaston, Historical, Lumpkin, Grace, Mountains, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Dave Griffin is a young man from the North Carolina mountains. After graduating from NC State, he gets a job with a large conglomerate in a city a lot like Charlotte. He has a house in the suburbs and a girlfriend who knows all the right people.  His life looks good until his company decides to replace their American programmers with cheaper workers from India.  Joe Tremain is a FBI agent who is a let go by the agency after he sustains a disabling head injury.  Both men soon find out that the American safety net doesn’t cover the basics of everyday life.  After a chance meeting with Joe’s daughter, Lark, Dave comes to live with the Tremains.  The two men have an uneasy relationship, even as Joe draws the younger man into his schemes and Dave falls in love with Lark.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: August 5th, 2009 under 2000-, 2005, Evans, L. C., Piedmont.
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Time’s Witness is narrated by Cuddy Mangum, formerly a homocide detective and now the Chief of Police for the Piedmont town of Hillston. By his own admission Cuddy doesn’t have the best thing one can have in Hillston (class), or even the second best thing (looks). What he does have are brains and he makes use of them in this, the second of the Justin and Cuddy mysteries. With a young African-American man’s execution on the horizon, racial tensions rise in the town and things only get worse when the convict’s brother is murdered. Then a candidate for governor becomes involved and starts receiving death threats. Complicating matters is the fact that the politician’s wife is Cuddy’s first–and perhaps only real–love.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: March 24th, 2009 under 1980-1989, 1989, Malone, Michael, Mystery, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Novels in Series, Piedmont.
Comments: none

A Chosen Few is the third in Carolyn Booth’s trilogy of books that recount the struggles of rural, coastal North Carolinians during the 1920s and 1930s. While the plot revolves around the Ryan and McBride families and their relationships, much of the characters’ attention and activities are directed toward the the Penderlea Homestead Farms and other New Deal politics/projects of the Great Depression. The brainchild of Wilmington businessman Hugh MacRae, the Penderlea Homesteads were meant to be part of a cooperative, self-sufficient “farm city” in Pender County that would provide resettlement and relief for bankrupt farmers. The author was born in Bladen County and her family lived on a Penderlea Homestead until 1939; A Chosen Few is loosely based on her family and its experiences.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library Catalog.

Posted: November 3rd, 2008 under 2000-, 2008, Bladen, Booth, Carolyn Rawls, Coast, Coastal Plain, Historical, Novels in Series, Onslow, Pender.
Comments: none

It is a stretch to call this a North Carolina novel. Over a hundred pages are set in the boardrooms of Manhattan. The author’s goal is to reveal the way trusts, corporations, and large banks manipulate the commercial and political systems, to the detriment of the the average citizen. After the plans of the robber barons are put into place, the extended Shelton family is ruined. One of the few rays of hope for ordinary people is the Democratic Convention of North Carolina where the “representative of the people” achieves some victories. The heroic figure of the convention is the Hon. William Fitchen, who is thought to be modeled on Congressman and North Carolina Governor W.W. Kitchin.

Check this title’s availability and access an online copy through the UNC-Chapel Hill Library Catalog.

Posted: July 17th, 2008 under 1900-1909, 1906, Novels to Read Online, Tapp, Sidney C..
Comments: none

Judge Deborah Knott is adjusting to married life with her new husband, Dwight Bryant, and his young son Cal. There are signs that Colleton County is not doing as well accepting its newcomers–immigrant agricultural workers. When body parts begin to turn up around the county it’s clear that a murder has taken place. Who was the victim? Who is the murderer? The answers to these questions make this a timely book about race, class, and the vulnerability of immigrant laborers.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

Posted: May 23rd, 2008 under 2000-, 2007, Coastal Plain, Maron, Margaret, Mystery, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Novels in Series.
Comments: none

Set in the violent, lawless days just after the Civil War, this novel explores the deeply complicated questions about how the South would recover and adjust to new ideas about race and class. Daniel McFee, a former slave who had fought for the Union, has returned home to western North Carolina to become a sharecropper on land owned by his old master, Madison Curtis. Despite good intentions, both Curtis and McFee have trouble adjusting to this new relationship. It’s especially hard to make any meaningful progress when the whole region is overrun with violent vigilantes all too willing to take matters into their own hands. The novel is based in part on the author’s family history. Freedom’s Altar won the 1999 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the best novel by a North Carolinian.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

Posted: March 13th, 2008 under 1990-1999, 1999, Historical, Mountains, Price, Charles.
Comments: none

Edwin Keene has become something of a recluse after a tragic car accident in which one of the passengers was killed. The aristocratic Keene, son of a prominent local family, eases the pain of his own injuries with too-frequent doses of morphine. As his life appears to be slipping away, there is a sudden hope for redemption when Keene falls for Eureka Spaight, a local high-school girl whose working-class family is very different from his own. The novel is set in the early 1950s in the fictional eastern North Carolina town of Trent.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

Posted: March 13th, 2008 under 1990-1999, 1993, Coastal Plain, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Parker, Michael.
Comments: none

Mike Olive and several classmates from Duke spend the summer in fictional Cottesville, N.C. alongside Mexican migrant workers on a tobacco farm. The students are working on a project to document the living and working conditions of the workers, and find that conditions are even worse than they imagined. As they began to protest the abuses they see, the locals are none too happy, especially Harvey Dickerson, Mike’s childhood friend. To make things even more complicated, Mike has fallen for the daughter of one of the Mexican workers. As the end of the summer approaches, Mike finds that there are now several people out to get him.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

Posted: March 13th, 2008 under 2000, 2000-, Martin, Eric.
Comments: none