Skip Rock Shallows

Title: SKIP ROCK SHALLOWS

Author: Jan Watson

Publisher: Tyndale Fiction

May 2012

ISBN:  978-1414339146

Genre: historical

Lilly Gray Corbett has just graduated from medical school and decided to accept an internship in the coal camp of Skip Rock, Kentucky. Her beau, Paul, is doing his residency in Boston and can’t understand why Lilly would choose to work in a backwater town. But having grown up in the mountains, Lilly is drawn to the stubborn, superstitious people she encounters in Skip Rock—a town where people live hard and die harder and where women know their place. Lilly soon learns she has a lot to overcome, but after saving the life of a young miner, she begins to earn the residents’ trust.

As Lilly becomes torn between joining Paul in Boston and her love for the people of Skip Rock, she crosses paths with a handsome miner—one who seems oddly familiar. Her attraction for him grows, even as she wrestles with her feelings and wonders what he’s hiding.

SKIP ROCK SHALLOWS is a stand-alone book about a woman who earned her medical degree and now needs to earn the trust and love of a mining community in the Kentucky mountains. I enjoyed the story, Ms. Watson is a very good writer, able to bring even the secondary characters to life, even though we’re not privy to their thoughts, we know exactly what is going through their minds by the detail given to expressions and actions.

The town is superstitious of a woman doctor, though why that surprises Lilly remains a mystery. Having grown up in the mountains she should’ve known the mind-set of the mountain people. And since she was drawn back to them, then why did she fall in love with a “city slicker?”  I hoped that she’d be able to find her place, be accepted as who and what she was, and find love in the process.

If you enjoy historicals, then don’t miss SKIP ROCK SHALLOWS. If you especially love books set in the Appalachain, Blue Ridge, and other mountains of the east then you’re in for a treat. $12.99. 400 pages.