Comments for Funny How Things Change

Funny How Things Change: 01/25/14

Funny How Things Change by Melissa Wyatt takes place in what's left of a West Virginia mining town. Jobs are scarce. Money is scarce.

Remy has a college bound girlfriend and he's got a job at a local mechanics. He's been planning to follow Lisa when she leaves for college. He figures he can get a job at any garage. Then, things change with the arrival of a student artist, working with grant money to spruce up the town and capture the coal mining history through her art.

Her fish out of water take on this little ex-mining town makes Remy re-examine his own relationship with both the town and the mountain. His internal struggle acts as the stage for building character studies for the town and the mountain.

As it happened, I read this book on the heels of finishing Jeannette Wall's memoir The Glass Castle — part of which covers her time with her father's family in West Virginia. While the conditions depicted in Funny How Things Change are no where near as bleak as Walls's memoir, her descriptions continually crept in and colored my interpretation of Wyatt's novel. I think, though, that Wyatt's book is to be open ended.

.

Three stars

Comments (0)