Book Review: The Hills Are Calling

This Sunday Book review is being pre-posted, so there's no adorable adoptable animal...how would I know which animals are still unadopted at the time of reading? 

Book Review: The Hills Are Calling

Author: Irene B. Brand

Date: 1990

Publisher: Mountain State Press

ISBN: 0-941092-224

Length: 189 pages

Quote: “‘Don’t cross my path again. I only warn once.’ As Adams climbed unsteadily into the saddle, he held Don with his wicked stare, and Don thought, Why is this man wretched?”

Irene B. Brand’s intention in this “inspirational novel” was to present a good oldfashioned romance that avoids the ordinary kind of unhealthy fantasies, so it is my sad duty to warn readers that this whole novel is one long indulgence in an unhealthy fantasy. Here is no premarital sex, no murders or elopements or impossible fortunes. The romance is clean, with just a few family-filtered kisses before the protagonists are married. The book is still pervaded by one of the most harmful fantasies in which Christians can indulge.

That fantasy is: “Christians, or at least Christian ministers, know all the answers in life.” Don, the minister given the leading part in The Hills Are Calling, comes to town and immediately falls in love with one man (Adams, the mean drunk) and one woman (Addie). It is probably not homoeroticism, but a desire to make this novel a bit different from every other wholesome-type romance you’ve ever read, that prompts Brand to tell us that Don is impressed by Adams’ handsome face, but not “even the eyes of love” could call Addie beautiful. However, what Don is really in love with is not these people as they are, but his fantasy that he can rescue them from their “wretchedness.” Don is not physically afraid of Adams merely because the bigger, stronger man threatens to beat him up, and later does; he just holds on to his perception that nobody becomes a mean drunk unless he is really “wretched” and in need of the sort of counselling Don can offer. When he meets the two single women in town, the pretty one who works at the post office and the plain one who is complaining about a local character tampering with her mail, he’s not (conscious of being) attracted to the plain one because he senses that he’s not enough of a catch for the pretty one; he’s drawn to the plain one because, although he never thinks about a woman’s right to privacy needing any defense, he wants to cure her “bitterness” with more counselling.

In a really inspirational story, even on the level of Christy, events would shake Don out of his pseudospiritual pigheadedness. Some people who did or did not go to his church would know things Don didn’t know. If not physically crippled, he’d be at least mentally humiliated, forced to confront his imperfection and mortality. Although Don’s self-confidence is a realistic portrait of the act very young men tend to put on, he needs to develop a more realistic form of self-esteem, a faith that the Great Spirit can still work through even complacent oafs like him if he consents to move his ego out of the way.

In The Hills Are Calling, what needs to happen, to make Don a believable or likable character, fails to happen. He steamrollers along, his fantasy undisturbed by reality. Adams is wretched! And Addie is bitter! And both of them are so eager, and so grateful, for Don’s counselling! (Well, at least after Don improbably beats him up Adams is grateful for Don’s counselling.) This by itself would not be altogether unbelievable—once in a while a very young Christian does get to watch an alcoholic hit bottom, and Addie wouldn’t be the first lonely girl who, in the bad old days when a woman really couldn’t depend on her ability to work for her living, expressed a need for counselling in order to snag a promising preacher. But nobody else knows anything Don needs to learn, either! All the old married people in the fictional town are just sheep, bleating gratefully about how much they need a minister...and although, in real life, this by itself would be an indicator of how much Don stands to learn from them, the story doesn’t go on long enough for Don to see the indicator. At the end of the book other characters’ lives have changed, but Don is still the selfrighteous adolescent fool he was at the beginning of the story, with no hope for change and people depending on him for guidance, and God help them all.

The book doesn’t fail all its characters, or readers, as badly as it fails Don. What deserves mentioning is the fact that, apart from their “less educated” dialect, the townsfolk aren’t portrayed as hillbilly stereotypes. Adams is, of course, a stereotypical drunkard (apparently not a true alcoholic), and Addie is a stereotypical 1930s romance heroine as played by Greta Garbo. The other townsfolk get only cameo appearances, as generic parishioners—but not as hillbillies. The ones Don doesn’t have to pray over in their sickbeds, or bury, actually work. They’re either much older than Don, or much younger, but they’re presented as the kind of people we can believe Don would be interested in knowing.

The blurb promises “humor, drama, pathos, and superb dialogue.” ??? It’s a romance, people. There is a minor character who tries to make people laugh, and in real life his twinkly eyes might have that effect, but the novel is no more hilarious than it is suspenseful. I didn’t laugh, or even smile, once while reading The Hills Are Calling. The drama is about as predictable as it is in most romance novels: Jack shall have Jill and all will be well. The pathos is believable: this is the 1930s but Brand actually lived in West Virginia and didn't confuse it with the fantasy of "AppaLAYsha" from Eleanor Roosevelt's guilt trips. The dialogue is readable, but “superb” is not an adjective that comes to my mind. 

The book would be more satisfactory if it didn’t have to compete with its blurb. I wish Don had learned a lesson; my fingers itch to add a few chapters to the end—“Then Don remembered the little boy who’d told him he fought like Max Schmeling when he’d finally pitched into Ezra Adams on Paul’s behalf...and Don realized that this big, mean drunk was fighting like Joe Louis.” Or, “‘Reading my letters again, are you?’ Addie yelled, as the still-warm clothing he had just dropped on the floor draped around Don’s head. ‘What’s the matter with you now?’ he asked, wondering what had become of her joyous new life in Jesus. ‘The matter with me is that I’m married to you,’ Addie bayed, ‘but I won’t be for long!’” Still, I could deal with the limitations the romance genre imposes if the blurb hadn’t promised “humor, drama, pathos, and superb dialogue.” Authors need to stop writing inflated blurbs for each other, or letting others write inflated blurbs for them. This is a sweet, clean romance, if you’re in the mood for one; it is not The Grapes of Wrath, Gone with the Wind, or even Christy.