Part memoir, part family history. Whatever you want to call Cassie Chambers’ book, Hill Women, it’s a beautiful story told with love, respect, and pride. While the subtitle is “Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains”, it’s the story of strong women who supported each other, supported others in their community, and encouraged women to find their own path.

Owsley County in eastern Kentucky is one of the poorest counties in America. Cassie Chambers’ mother grew up there, and her extended family lives in the hills there. While outsiders see the poverty, the drug addiction, the dependence on disability payments, Chambers respects the people for their hard work. She says there’s a fire that fuels so many women in rural Kentucky. She says people broke their bodies in tobacco fields and coal mines to make a living. “We don’t take time to see it: the hope in the poverty, the spark against the dreary backdrop, the grit in the mountain women.”

Cassie saw that grit in her Granny and her Aunt Ruth, two women who worked so hard so Cassie’s mother could go to college, to be the first one in her family to go to college. While Chambers’ Granny married at fifteen, and her Aunt Ruth was forced to drop out of high school because of her health, they pushed Cassie’s mother to go to Berea College, to leave their small community, and to find something beyond Cow Creek. Cassie’s mother met her husband at Berea College. She graduated, and used her education to benefit children. Her husband went on to become an associate dean at the University of Kentucky. And, Cassie, who spent her childhood commuting between her young parents’ home in Berea while they finished school, and her Granny’s home in Owsley County, became a lawyer. She graduated from Yale College, the Yale School of Public Health, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School, where she was president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, a student-run law firm that represents low-income clients. She now works with domestic violence survivors in eastern Kentucky.

But, before she became a lawyer to return to her roots and help her fellow Kentuckians, Cassie Chambers loved the family and the roots that took her back to Appalachia. She honors the people who made her journey and her life possible. She tells the story of her Granny’s life, her mother’s life, and her own life in this moving book.

Hill Women made me angry at times, angry at some of the laws that are written to defeat the ordinary people trying to get divorces, attain child custody, leave partners that abuse them. But, it also made me cry several times with the courage shown by some of the women in the book, along with the story itself. Hill Women is a beautiful, loving tribute. In the last four years, following the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, there have been other books that examined Appalachia. Let’s be honest. It’s not a story that can be told in one book. Everyone is not the same, and one book can’t, and shouldn’t, represent the entire region. Cassie Chambers’ book is the story of the women she knew. There’s so much love and pride in this book that it’s hard to read it, and not hope that it represents the best in people, loving, hard-working people, no matter where they live or where they come from.

Cassie Chambers’ website is www.cassiechambers.com

Hill Women by Cassie Chambers. Ballantine Books, 2020. ISBN 9781984818911 (hardcover), 304p.

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