3.5
Jolene
ByPublisher Description
The beloved Elemental Masters series moves to America for the first time in a rich retelling of The Queen of the Copper Mountain, set against the backdrop of Tennessee coal country.
Anna May Jones is the daughter of a coal miner, but a sickly constitution has kept her confined to the house for most of her life. Hoping to improve her daughter’s health—and lessen the burden on their family—Anna's mother sends her to live with her Aunt Jinny, a witchy-woman and an Elemental Master, in a holler outside of Ducktown.
As she settles into her new life, Anna learns new skills at Aunt Jinny’s side and discovers that she, too, has a gift for Elemental magic that Jinny calls “the Glory”. She also receives lessons from a mysterious and bewitching woman named Jolene, who assures her that, with time, Anna could become even more powerful than her aunt.
But with Anna’s increasing power comes increasing notice. Billie McDaran, the foreman of the Ducktown mine, begins to take an interest in Anna and her abilities—even though Anna has already fallen in love with a young man with a talent for stonecarving.
If she wants to preserve the life she has come to love, Anna must use her newfound powers to oppose the foreman and protect those around her.
Anna May Jones is the daughter of a coal miner, but a sickly constitution has kept her confined to the house for most of her life. Hoping to improve her daughter’s health—and lessen the burden on their family—Anna's mother sends her to live with her Aunt Jinny, a witchy-woman and an Elemental Master, in a holler outside of Ducktown.
As she settles into her new life, Anna learns new skills at Aunt Jinny’s side and discovers that she, too, has a gift for Elemental magic that Jinny calls “the Glory”. She also receives lessons from a mysterious and bewitching woman named Jolene, who assures her that, with time, Anna could become even more powerful than her aunt.
But with Anna’s increasing power comes increasing notice. Billie McDaran, the foreman of the Ducktown mine, begins to take an interest in Anna and her abilities—even though Anna has already fallen in love with a young man with a talent for stonecarving.
If she wants to preserve the life she has come to love, Anna must use her newfound powers to oppose the foreman and protect those around her.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities46 Reviews
3.5
“2.5 Stars
It kills me to rate this so low, but the Elemental Masters series is pretty hit or miss for me. I absolutely love some of the early books, but am pretty lukewarm about the Sherlock Holmes retellings. As a whole, I really enjoy Mercedes Lackey's world-building and how she weaves the elementals into historical settings, but Jolene was more of a complete miss.
First off, I thought the official summary for the book is completely wrong. Anna May's mother sends her to Aunt Jinny because Anna May is sickly - she is sensitive to earth magic and the heavily polluted earth around the mines is killing her slowly. The company does eventually come looking for Anna to pay off a debt her parents owe, but this is in the last 30 or so pages of the book.
In fact, all of the action and tension in the book don't happen until the end and it all gets clumped together and tied up very quickly and neatly. Normally I love a good cozy slice of life story, but there was so much introduced here that could have been further explored, such as the Cherokee family that lives by Anna and how they use the magic versus how Anna's family uses it, especially when this book is such a departure from others in the series location-wise.
There is also a romance between Anna and the neighbor boy, but its very instant love instead of the two getting to know each other gradually, which would make more sense giving how this book drags a bit. Aunt Jinny has a good point - he's the first boy that's ever paid attention to Anna, but he's the only one for her so of course they have to court.
I thought combining Dolly Parton's Jolene song into this book was... weird. There's some direct quotes near the end and it just didn't fit well for me.
But the biggest sin this book committed was the dialect. The characters all speak in what I believe is supposed to be an Appalachian dialect and it was a lot. I could handle it to a point, but ya'll is constantly used to refer to a single person, and I have only ever heard it used for more than one person. I've lived in Texas and know many people from Tennesee/Kentucky and I have never heard anyone use it the way this book did, and it drove me nuts. That alone will keep me from re-reading this book anytime soon.”
Nydia Burdick
Created 4 months agoShare
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Wyatt
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“This was a really slow book to read, good storyline but hard to get into.”
Aidan Gruber
Created 6 months agoShare
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