According to folklore in the Smoky Mountains,“When you enter the world with your feet pawing the air before your eyes can see where to put them, it’s a strong sign you’ll lose your way from time to time.”
Right from the start, Layla Tompkin’s way forward is full of detours after her mother dies in breech birth, leaving only her and her devoted, sorrowful father, Ed. Then, at the age of five, Layla is rendered mute after a horrible accident. “God is leading Layla to speak in new tongues," proclaims Pastor Simpson at the local serpent handling church.
Soon after, Layla is found to possess the gift of healing and her reputation spreads. Even Doc Fredericks, the area’s skeptical physician, is forced to re-examine scientific tenets when Layla's healing touch is the only treatment that brings relief to his son Brian, whose legs were blown off by a landmine in Vietnam. Doubt and the miraculous, loss and survival, hurt and forgiveness collide when a secret challenges what everyone holds true, leaving Layla, her family and the community profoundly changed in a story about what it means to be truly healed. ~~ synopsis from Goodreads
My thoughts on The Healer of Fox Hollow ~~
I absolutely LOVED this book!! It grabbed me from the very beginning of the book and kept me entralled until the very end. It is a beautifully written story of a little girl who has to endure so much but has so much to give back. I don't want to give away any more of the story other than what is written in the synopsis above. This is one that you have to experience yourself, page by page.
I would have read this book from cover to cover in one sitting, no matter how many hours it would have taken, if I could have. A little thing like my life and work got in the way of me totally devouring this story.
There are so many wonderful and beautiful lines in this story. I can't share all of the ones I marked because I don't want to give away too much of the story but here are a few passages that I loved ~~
'In addition to losing all the ways she loved his wife, he'd also lost all the ways that she loved him.'
'....she prayed that when she died.... she'd be able to say all she'd been waiting to tell her mama. And she's ask God why He let her mama die.'
'Saying his daughter had keen ears was saying a lot because the sensibilities of most mountain fold were as fine-tuned as a fiddler's string.'
'Sometimes, Layla thought, death wasn't the worst thing. Living life in the claws of fear was worse because whatever time you did have was ruined.'
'....if you watch the sunrise each morning, you are given a new beginning. And each evening's sunset offers respite from whatever trials the day may bring.'
Aren't these lines just amazing?
I highly recommend
The Healer of Fox Hollow and I will be encouraging all of my friends to read it. It is probably one of the most memorable books I have read this year!
TLC Book Tours is offering a copy of this wonderful book to a reader of The Book Bag. US/Canada only.
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About the author
Wisconsin born Joann Rose Leonard was Texas-raised and has chigger bite scars to prove it. Theatre-trained and frostbitten at Northwestern University, she worked as an actress in New York and in regional theatres across the U.S. She studied mime in Paris with Marcel Marceau at École Internationale de Mimodrame while dubbing films into English to earn her daily baguette. Later she raised 9 kids (2 human, 7 goats) in State College Pennsylvania, where she was founder and director of MetaStages, the youth theatre program at Penn State University. With her husband Bob, a retired professor and professional theatre director, Joann recently relocated to northern California to be nearer their sons, Jonathan (DJ Child, award-winning music producer and founder of the multi-media company, Project Groundation) and Joshua (actor/filmmaker including
The Lie, Higher Ground and
The Blair Witch Project.)
Joann is author of
The Soup Has Many Eyes: From Shtetl to Chicago;
One Family's Journey Through History (Bantam);
"From Page to Stage,” a chapter in Holt Rinehart Winston’s
Elements of Literature; and two collections of multicultural folk plays,
All the World's a Stage Volumes I & II (Baker's Plays).
In her research for
The Healer of Fox Hollow, Joann discovered that the truth the novel is based upon is infinitely stranger than the fiction she wrote.
"The Healer of Fox Hollow began as a personal exploration. To better understand what unifies us as well as what separates us, I imagined myself with radically different mindsets from my own.
Guided by the all-too-real, this story pushed me to places where ordinary language fails. Places of darkness and the horrific. Places of doubt where we stand naked in our fear, loneliness, suffering. Places of healing and light where we experience heartbreaking human kindness, forgiveness, grace, love, and ultimate mystery." ~~ Joann Rose Leonard
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