Jenny's Mountain

With determined courage and grit, young wife and mother Jenny Williams carves a life for herself out of the bare bones of a mountain homestead and an unfulfilling marriage. From a cabin near the highway dump where she lives in primitive fashion with Mike and their two children, Jenny moves to an even bleaker hovel situated on a mining claim in the Colorado Rockies, where her husband hopes to find gold ore. Mike becomes dispirited and sexually abusive and, in a role reversal of consequence, Jenny finds night work as a waitress in a rowdy roadhouse, and in the daylight hours learns to excavate the mine. Juggling a punishing work schedule with the responsibilities of motherhood, she manages to get a high school equivalency diploma, begins to deal assertively with sexual harassment and, after Mike's death as a result of drunk driving, accepts the love of a fine man. Although Jenny is a wonder woman, at times seeming to defy credibility, the story of her triumph is engaging. Long fills the narrative with intimate, workaday details that illumine the struggle of a woman who, despite the most daunting circumstances, nurtures and protects her children. (December 21)