Kelley Rae

A Place Called Solid Kelley Rae

"A Place Called Solid" is a story about a Scottish family who immigrated and settled in the mountains of West Virginia during the creation of America as early as 1658. Rae traces her family through the mountains into the bars and churches littered with the faithful and the hypocritical, the alcoholics and the teetotalers, the sad and the humorous. The characters are all refugees from elsewhere who attempt to create a new home in the unforgiving mountains of West Virginia only to fight with nature and each other in the process. What they once ran from, they now recreate in their new life and hand it to their children . . . children who carry the burden onto their own. But Rae ends the suffering by bringing to light the pain and the wrong that haunts her ancestors. She tells the story of her grandmother and mother through their female ancestors, attempting to make sense of a fractured and ghost-like past filled with bars and baptisms. Sometimes funny and sometime irreverent, Rae gives live to the dead she belongs to. This memoir is about the coming of age of a young Appalachian girl, whose family and the women in it are at the whims of nature and a rapidly evolving society that devalues her historical roots and her innocence. Both humorous and profound, A Place Called Solid captures a place and a time that is rapidly disappearing.