"STRANGE AS THIS WEATHER HAS BEEN"

(10/29/2007)

West Virginian Ann Pancake has written a novel about mountaintop removal mining, a first-hand view of how it affects people. Pancake's new book is "Strange as This Weather Has Been." The author is from Hampshire County and is a summa cum laude graduate of West Virginia University. Pancake spent seven years on the book, including three years interviewing people in Southern West Virginia. Her sister Catherine Pancake, filmed the newly released "Black Diamonds: Mountaintop Removal & The Fight for Coalfield Justice." "Ann Pancake's fine, ambitious first novel is about something simple: what it's like to live below a mountaintop-removal strip mine," wrote NY Times reviewer Jack Pendarvis. Pancake is a distant relative of Breece D'J Pancake, who committed suicide at 26, becoming a bit of a mythical figure for his published work of a dozen lean, spare short stories about the tension between modern and traditional in Appalachia.

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