The Well and the Mine -- Gin Phillips

It's not all that often that my boss hands me a book and insists that I read it, but I will be forever grateful that such was the case with Gin Phillips' The Well and the Mine.

Set in Carbon Hill, Alabama in 1931, this story of the Moore family is truly poetic. With these opening lines, how could you not continue to read?

After she threw the baby in, nobody believed me for the

longest time. But I kept hearing that splash.

The speaker is Tess, a young girl who witnesses a woman throw a baby into the Moore family's well, and it is this heartbreaking event that serves as a catalyst for the story.

Albert Moore, her father, is a coal miner imbued with the sort of decency that we just don't get to read about much in fiction these days. I will admit that this whole family (the story is told in their intertwined voices) began to make me nervous -- when were we going to find out the dark deep horrid secret that the father was an abusive man, or that Leta, his wife, hated her life?

It's a testament to Phillips' flawless writing -- never a wasted word -- that good people are made every bit as fascinating and complex as the lurking deviant generally seems to be.

The blurbs on this book would lead you to believe it's full of the coal miner woes or a treatise on racial relations, but it truly is not. Those elements do come into play, but never in a forced way, never in a heavy handed way - but in a very real way. There's no doubt making a living in the mines is dreadful, but you won't hear Albert moan and groan about it -- it's how he takes care of his family, and he is proud of his work. His relationship with a black coworker, Jonah, says all anybody needs to say about the truth of people, who, living in a flawed time, put greatest stock in the character of an individual, no matter their color.

What blows my mind is that the publisher of this beautiful novel is based in Portland, Oregon -- Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts -- and it is a credit to them that they recognized Ms. Phillips' gift to the body of Southern Literature. I generally don't pay a whole lot of attention to publishers, but like Algonquin here in the south, the strength of this book is enough to make me actively seek out their other titles.

This gentle, moving, delicious novel gets my highest endorsement.