Ken Byerly

Mountain Girl Ken Byerly

   Wade Talbot relishes the chaos of journalism.  He starts as an editor of a weekly newspaper in North Carolina and becomes a reporter in New York just as the civil rights struggles explode in the 1960s.  Becky Anderson leaps from her little southern town to college, to New York and then to Europe, where through sheer grit she becomes a force in the movie business.
   Wade romanticizes his boyhood in the hills of home.  Becky, perennially short of money, can't wait to break away.  But something clicks between them.  They compete, they quarrel, they savage each other, and one day in the deep rolling hills of old Virginia they come together.
   Mountain Girl is a primer on the American civil rights movement, a gritty travelogue with stops in Paris and an island in the Mediterranean, and a sexual duel in which both partners learn and grow.  
   Becky and Wade fight through obstacles, climb in their professions.  Restless, ever seeking, they set out to hike the 2,200 mile Appalachian Trail.  Wade finds, finally, a theme for the novel he wants to write.  But at a cost.  He walks alone at the end to keep a promise, to climb a special mountain.