Summary from GoodReads:

A gentle yet unflinching look at how we find our way home. A woman returns to her West Virginia roots to resolve the ghosts of her childhood. In the tradition of Rebecca Wells, Sue Monk Kidd, Olive Ann Burns, and Dorothy Allison. TENDER GRACES by Kathryn Magendie is strong literary women’s fiction written with exquisite style.

The death of her troubled mother and memories of her abused grandmother lure a young woman back to the Appalachian hollow where she was born. Virginia Kate, the daughter of a beautiful mountain wild-child and a slick, Shakespeare-quoting salesman, relives her turbulent childhood and the pain of her mother’s betrayals. Haunted by ghosts and buried family secrets, Virginia Kate struggles to reconcile three generations of her family’s lost innocence.

My Review:

West Virginia has never been a place on my “to-visit” list. I’m sure everyone can say they’ve heard some joke or another regarding the state, and while I can appreciate that it has its beauty (according to pictures I’ve seen), it’s just always seemed to me a place where sadness and depression would be.

While Tender Graces doesn’t debunk that thought of mine, necessarily, it also provides perspective and sheds light on it.  In spite of the sadness and depression (which is present everywhere), there’s beauty and hope and magic in that place – and that’s what the main character, Virginia Kate, finds through this story.

Virginia Kate’s mother is beautiful – too beautiful for her own good.  And as the years pass, Virginia Kate and her brothers watch their parents marriage crumble and new people are introduced to their lives, including a step-mama.  And folks, let me just say I was prepared to hate this woman right along with Virginia Kate – but Rebeckah became, by far, the most dynamic, amazing character in the book for me.

Kathryn Magendie provides beautiful, heart-wrenching emotions through the characters in this book that had me weeping along with them and hoping against hope that everything would turn out okay for them.  Set this against a backdrop of beauty, described by some beautiful writing, and it’s a southern story that embodies the very essence of a state that is poorly represented by most print that I’ve read.

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