Shuckstack Mountain by David Henry

The blinding power of even small facets of nature is the crux of SHUCKSTACK MOUNTAIN.

On Samuel Meller’s eighteenth birthday, Hitler invades Poland, and his family’s barn goes up in a blaze of fireworks and misplaced war fever. His poor vision keeps him from the Western Front, and Samuel finds himself in the Smoky Mountains, a fire lookout for the forest service. In addition to raging fires, he is forced to confront his youthful foolishness, his own mortality, and the guilt of a survivor.

SHUCKSTACK MOUNTAIN echoes the simple sincerity of the transcendentalists while maintaining a sense of wonder as evoked by Charles Frazier’s COLD MOUNTAIN, and David Guterson’s EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS.