Coal River

Coal River is the story of a small mining town of the same name during the early twentieth century. When New Yorker Emma Malloy is orphaned and forced to move in with her aunt and uncle in Coal River, she is appalled by what she sees. Both mine and town are run by owner Hazard Flint, a greedy, uncaring tyrant who doesn't seem to understand that the people who work for him are, well, people. The grinding poverty of the miners' families and the danger they face sicken Emma, but worst of all is the plight of the breaker boys. Boys as young as 6 are sent to work in the breaker sorting coal until their fingers bleed and interacting with machinery that maims and kills with a terrifying frequency.

Emma vows to help the breaker boys anyway she can, even if that means drawing the ire of her aunt and uncle (not to mention Flint) and putting herself in danger.

Ellen Marie Wiseman does an admirable job of reminding us of the horrors of the coal mining industry in the early twentieth century with this novel. She lost me a bit at the end though. Without giving away any spoilers, let's just say that the end of the book veers off into fairy tale land which is made even more jarring by how realistic the rest of the book was. Or perhaps that was Wiseman's aim? To make us think about how conditions were so deplorable back then that it would take a miracle to change them all at once? Or maybe some authors will just go to any length to create a happy ending for their characters, realism be damned. At any rate, though the ending was a miss for me, Coal River is an excellent book overall.

Coal River is a book that anyone who questions the need for unions and workplace regulations needs to read. It seems that the farther away from the days before these things existed in any meaningful form, the more we forget how necessary they are or how dangerous powerful people can be when they are purely motivated by greed. 

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.