Frank Carlson Library

Chronicles the story of the settlers of America's first frontier--the lands over the Appalachian Mountains--and of the faith that carried them through the harshest of times. In Among the King's Soldiers, Sarah MacNeal is struggling with the death of Philip Baxter. Her stepbrother, Jacob Spencer, escorts her and her friend Amanda Taylor back across the mountains to Williamsburg to visit Jacob's grandparents. Here Jacob becomes embroiled in a struggle...

Follows the author's family's efforts to live on locally- and home-grown foods, an endeavor through which they learned lighthearted truths about food production and the connection between health and diet.

In Strickland County, a forgotten stretch of land in southern Appalachia, there isn't a lot of anything to go around. But when eighteen-year-old Harlowe Compton's brother is killed by the Praters, the family who controls everything from the mines to the law to the opioid trade, he wonders if the future will ever hold more than loss. With Tennessee, Harlowe feels for the first time that something good might happen, that he might have found the rarest...

In this novel a mother and a daughter try to do right by a town and each other before it is too late. What is happening in Acker's Gap, West Virginia? Three elderly men are gunned down over their coffee at a local diner, and seemingly half the town is there to witness the act. Still, it happened so fast, and no one seems to have gotten a good look at the shooter. Was it random? Was it connected to the spate of drug violence plaguing poor areas...

At the age of ten, an Appalachian girl develops croaks, jerks and spasms, which leads to her explusion from school. After treatment--she has Tourette's syndrome--she learns to control herself, attends college and there is a happy ending.

"Everyone in Blackberry Falls knows that Tabitha Stolfus is heir to her daed’s wood carving company. To find a man who values more than her purse, Tabitha creates an ad and sends it far from home. But from her first meeting with handsome would-be groom Matthew King, Tabitha realizes this may not be the uncomplicated arrangement she expected. Matthew’s true desire is an apprenticeship, not a frau. A talented woodworker, he longs to study...

When one after another family member goes the store for baking soda and never returns, the pet squirrel decides to investigate in this retelling of a traditional Appalachian tale. Includes a recipe for soda biscuits.

Ruthie and her mother wonder how they will fulfill their obligation of getting the perfect Christmas tree to the town for the holiday celebration, since Papa has left the Appalachian area to go to war.

Minna proudly wears her new coat made of clothing scraps to school, where the other children laugh at her until she tells them the stories behind the scraps.