Wise but not wizened, precocious beyond her years, in this memoir-like novel of 1988, now reprinted, ten-year-old Dorie Parks is a girl caught in the in-between space of childhood and almost-aware youth when the late 1960's social upheavals reach her sleepy hollow, Poorwater, a town on the Wye River in Virginian Appalachia. Tough as Mick Kelly of Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Dorie weathers reprisals aimed at her father in his fight against a mining company that regards accidents, acceptable death tolls, and black lung as the traditional hazards of a coal miner's life.

This is a time when astronauts are making forays into space, when television carries the news of a changing nation over the mountains and into Poorwater's homes. With her copy of The Arabian Nights expanding her worldview, Dorie looks to the moon and stars as the places where her hopes and dreams lie.

But she's tethered to Poorwater, too, by the realities of poverty. While not as destitute as the shoeless "holler" kids of the hill shacks, Dorie's a girl who scans the ground for change, who nearly drowns trying to pluck a dime from the deep end of the pool. It's her friendship with Betty Grayson, a local rich girl, and Betty's dissolving family, which shows her how little happiness money can command. It's money, too, in the end, the reckless pursuit of it, which brings on the tragedy of her mysterious and disturbed older brother, a draft-dodging itinerant preacher.

Holy Rollers and hippies, snake dancers and moonshiners, a neighborhood "witch", "dirty boys" who chase girls with sticks, hard scrabble union men, company thugs with a knack for breaking arms, are a few of the raw and real characters who color Hankla's novel of social chronicle and coming-of-age. At times as quiet as the simple pleasure of a hot biscuit brushed with butter, at times as furious as a mine explosion, A Blue Moon In Poorwater is the story of a man's need for justice seen through the eyes of a girl who loves her daddy. A wonderful book resurrected by a university press.

                                                      --Tony D'Souza