Giardina writes quite vividly about life in the coal camps and tent cities, and that life can only be described as cruel.
This is a passionate, powerful book, one that is full of historically accurate violence and inhumanity. There is little solace and hope at the end, except for the fact that a new generation, in Dillon Freeman, keeps alive the memory and the struggle of the miners. This book reminds us all of the sacrifices our forebearers have made and the sacrifices still demanded to create a more humane country. Storming Heaven is "no puny thing."
--Robert M. Coughlin. Appalachian Heritage
15:4, 61-2 (F87).
Storming Heaven is a forceful, full hearted account. The story moves with the soaring rhythm of oldtime music. The people who come alive on these pages will not easily leave a reader's imagination.
The author's first novel, Good King Harry, showed her to be as skillful a researcher as she is a writer; and her penchant for accuracy broadens this novel of West Virginia history. The events from the Matewan Massacre to the Battle of Blair Mountain have been absent from textbooks for too long.
--Colleen Anderson. Goldenseal 14, 70 (Spr
88).
In reaction to Giardina's incorporation of her strong beliefs in her novel, Douglas Bauer comments "... manipulative prose abounds, and its effect is to turn the reader's attitude from one of initial sympathy with the miners' and Ms. Giardina's cause into a mounting irritation. ...Both history and political bias need to be artfully shaped and figuratively imposed if the're to do the revealing work in a piece of fiction. It is just this fictive deepening that Storming Heaven lacks.
--Douglas Bauer. New York Times Book Review
Sep 13, 1987
Her novel suggests she has learned the history of her region well, no doubt aided by her work with the Appalachian Land Ownership Study.
Giardina also shows us relationships between kin and community in the mountains, between labor and management, between blacks, whites, and immigrants all caught up in the gathering storm of industrialization.
Not only is Giardina's novel rich in symbolism, characterization and a sense of time and place, but it is also full of richly evocative language.
--Jean Haskell Speer. Appalachian Journal 15:4,
386-88.
...there are limits beyond which the author no longer relates credibly to the events that make up the core of the narrative. Giardina violates these limits at several points, with the result that the Armed March, for example, is make to appear planned rather than merely coordinated...Also, it was Mother Jones and not District President Frank Keeney who read a phony telegram from President Harding in an effort to turn the marchers around.
Giardina's fictional constructions sound hollow because they lack the balancing defects that would make them believable. Her characters are angelic, not human.
The absence of comic and creatural realism in Heaven means that the novel is lifeless and boring and dependent on the real events that it fictionalizes to give it interest.
--P.J. Laska Appalachian Journal 17:1, 67-71
(Fall 89)
Giardinas response to Laska's review was featured as a letter to the editor:
...This requires a response on my part, both to defend my own work and to point out errors in Laska's reading.
No one in Storming Heaven reads a fake telegram from President Harding....And Laska contradicts himself on the question of whether the march was planned or spontaneous. While doing my research it seemed to me a case could be made for both spontaneity and planning.
Historians must fret over such things. Novelists need not; in fact the fretting kills the story. ...I tried to listen to my characters and their sometimes contradictory stories, that was my ultimate responsibility.
--Denise Giardina. Appalachian Journal 20:3,
336.
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by Kathy Moore as a project for English 245--Appalachian Literature, West
Virginia University.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please contact me at kmoore2@wvu.edu