Strong Hollow

June M. Blurton is a retired speech/language pathologist.

All his life Jackson has known that his father dislikes him, referring
to him as “that one.” Within his large, noisy, dysfunctional family,
Jackson is the quiet one, terrified of contact with people and prone to
panic attacks. After he finds his father dead in a ditch, he builds
himself a cabin and becomes a bootlegger. He remains aloof from the
drunken revelers until a homosexual love affair breaks through his
defences, bringing the realization that he is capable of love. When the
affair ends, Jackson is devastated. A longtime woodcarver, he turns to
fiddle-making, his true vocation, and eventually joins the music scene
in Halifax.

Little handles her large cast of characters with skill. The siblings,
their offspring, the neighbors, and the musicians are well rounded, each
with unique strengths and weaknesses. The unsanitized dialogue reflects
that of real people, and the story brings the reader in contact with the
roughness and poverty of rural Nova Scotian life. All in all, Strong
Hollow is an absorbing novel.