Grab the Lapels

Sister Mine by Tawni O’dell

While Tawni O’dell is new to me, she has a few books under her belt. Known for setting her novels in Pennsylvania mining towns, O’dell grew up in the same environment from which she writes. In fact, she left her small mining community only to return to it later.

Sister Mine is a title that does a lot of work. It not only references the sisters in the story, but is also a term for coal mines that are connected somehow connected. In O’dell’s novel, the workers name the mines after women, so Jojo and Beverly are “sister mines.” It is that gesture of naming the mines instead of numbering that suggests how lovingly the workers perform their jobs. In fact, five miners were trapped in Jojo (or was it Beverly?) for four days with little oxygen and no food or water, leaving them with PTSD. However, some of the five choose to return because not only is mining part of their identities, but they love it.

But really, Sister Mine is about Shae-Lynn. She’s 40, she’s brassy, she’s a hoot, and she’s traumatized. While it’s bizarre to think of this person as the same age as me (or close), I appreciate reading about characters who have experience and thus a rolodex of options to new challenges. Certainly, readers will make assumptions about the people of a small coal mining town. Even our narrator, Shae-Lynn, tells us that “life is just a bunch of confusing, painful stuff that fills up the time between your favorite TV shows.” You get the image of people who work and then come home, beers in hands, dinner plates resting on their laps, as their turn on the mind-numbing shows that get them through to bedtime.

Then again, O’dell slowly reveals information to readers, so you’re constantly running into memories or facts you didn’t expect, giving the hilarity of the characters depth you wouldn’t have assumed. There are also the unsupervised children of the town’s despised, violent alcoholics. Shae-Lynn sees “a little girl pulling a little boy in a beat-up red wagon. She’s giving me the finger.” Characters are written as either degenerates or duty bound, but as the story progresses, those descriptors blur. It’s merely a set up to the environment so stereotypes are upended.

To illustrate, we learn more about Shae-Lynn, who was a single, teen-age mother who became a police officer at the nation’s capital and then in a small town near her coal-mining hometown, and now she’s an independent cab driver — the only one in the entire area, which introduces her to some outsides all looking for the same woman on the lamb that drive the plot.

O’dell knows her characters intimately, so while the plot is important, it’s the descriptions that kept me engaged. When Shae-Lynn goes to pick up a teen who missed the school bus, Shae-Lynn notices, “Autumn comes clunking down the walk in three-inch-high platform sandals that makes her sound like a horse and move like a giraffe.” In addition, if you know of men who always wear the same hat, never to be seen without it, you’ll know how important it is when Shae-Lynn realizes, “His ball cap goes flying. I’ve crossed a new threshold of importance.”

Even though some stereotypes hold true, O’dell is not confined by them. Shae-Lynn is sometimes hard to picture. She’s told by an out-of-towner in need of a cab ride, “I was just thinking that you dress like my neighbor. . . . My gay neighbor. My male gay neighbor.” It’s true, Shae-Lynn’s clothes could be described as inappropriate for her age, but you sense that she’s a bit clownish to hide all the things that have been done to her, things that O’dell reveals as the novel goes on, things that Shae-Lynn processes and begins to deal with.

Sister Mine is a highly engaging novel with laser-focused attention to characterization that I thoroughly enjoyed.

18 comments

  1. That is a remarkable cowboy boot on the cover! If it’s representative of the main character’s dress sense then I am impressed by her eclectic taste. (Although I always think tall boots like that look really uncomfortable).

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    • You have to keep those cowboy boots for about 15 years to really wear them in before there are comfortable. Ha! The main character, Shae-Lynn, really is a firecrackers, so I’m going to say yes, the boot is representative of who she is.

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  2. I’ve been in Western Pennsylvania these last few days, driving trucks (ok, reading Dave Newman about driving trucks) but didn’t get to any coal mining towns. I like reading authors who know their communities, and really, if you don’t read, then it’s either watch television or join your mates at the bar. I suspect for many people their favourite shows are the most important part of the day.

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    • At least in the Midwest, TV time is practically religious. The way the Catholics at Notre Dame don’t miss mass, Midwesterners don’t miss whatever sitcom is a big deal. I guess now it’s different because we can stream everything, but back when TV shows were on at a specific time and did not replay again until summer, you HAD to catch your show.

      You’re right that Newman doesn’t cover much of coal mining. His background, if I were to guess from his other books, is more in factories than mining.

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  3. This sounds interesting. I have an impression of the USA as full of these pockets of communities of very specific people. Like, this book doesn’t sound as though it could be set anywhere else. These characters have to exist in this town, which is actually pretty effective writing.

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    • Oh, I think you are 100% right. I’ve met some of these pockets of people and moved 200 miles away to find no one like that there. I actually entered what Michigan calls a “party store” on Monday and was like, “Yep, I’m in Michigan” despite being about 3 miles north of Indiana. It’s all culture. Great point, Karissa!

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        • Well, it’s tiny but packed full of stuff. In the coolers is mostly beer, and then all the types of milk, and a small section of “pop.” At the counter you’ll see very small candy available cheaply, almost like it’s left over from the days of the penny candy store.

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  4. This book sounds really good, I love learning about towns and the people who inhabit them. Last year I watched that series about the opioid crisis in a mining town, and it was so dark and depressing, I hate to think that all mining towns are plagued by these drugs, but with people whose jobs rely on this back breaking labour, I also understand why it happens so often.

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