and wins him to the ideas of socialism, though C.J. Doc Booker is a socialist who befriends C.J. Annadel is a racially integrated community whose previous mayor was the African-American Doctor Booker. Marcum (“Cincinnatus Jefferson, after the two greatest men that ever lived”) becomes the mayor of the fictional town of Annadel, West Virginia. Giardina uses four narrators to tell her story, each with an effectively distinctive voice. In Storming Heaven, Giardina has carefully integrated her characters and the fictitious Justice County, West Virginia, into the landscape and history of the Coal Wars. Typically in historical fiction, invented characters encounter historical figures, invented places are juxtaposed with actual places and the fictional plot incorporates historical events. The novel culminates with the Battle of Blair Mountain, which took place in the late summer of 1921. It takes as its subject the rapacious conquest by coal mining companies of southern West Virginia and the courageous battles waged by miners and their families in defense of their land, their labor and their lives. Denise Giardina’s novel Storming Heaven (Ivy Books, 1987) is a gripping work of historical fiction set in West Virginia during the first two decades of the 20th century.
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