Good book about modern Appalachian life. The characters were very real and believable. The reader is able to see the ghosts of Clay's life as they are unraveled bit by bit for him. His mother is a very prominent part of his life although she dies when he is only 4 years old. This book is about family and friends and faith. How they are all connected together. ( )

Part coming-of-age story and part paean to Appalachia, this impressive first novel tells the story of Clay Sizemore, orphaned in a violent act that has left its scars throughout his extended family.

House, who is in fact an Appalachian native, has a keen ear for dialogue and a gift for creating characters who come to life on the page. He treads a fine line through the practices of the Pentecostal church, which influences virtually everyone in the book, whether they are practitioners or not. And the music of the region is practically a character in its own right.

If there's a flaw here, it's that there's not a lot of internal tension. The characters go along in their day-to-day lives and even the underlying love story unfolds without a lot of high drama. The few violent confrontations, driven by alcohol, drugs, and jealousy erupt, play out, and mostly disappear quickly, even though they drive much of the plot.

The quilt metaphor is handled nicely, but so subtly that if it wasn't played up in the title, it might have gone largely unnoticed.

I doubt this book is going to change anyone's life, but it's a nice read and would make a good book club selection. ( )

Clay’s Quilt concludes the Appalachian family saga begun in A Parchment of Leaves and continued in The Coal Tattoo. I was surprised the writing wasn’t as polished or as lyrical as in the first two books until I checked the author’s page and found it was his first published work. All the same, it still expresses the deep connection to the land that made the other two books so moving. ( )

Clay's Quilt is set in the mountains of eastern Kentucky in the late 20th century. Its people are bound tightly to land, church and family even when they have left the church and families have been fractured by drugs, death and dysfunction. For many of them, this bond is both precious and perilous, a tie that can be loosened, but never cut. At the age of four, Clay Sizemore survived the drunken rampage in which his father killed his mother and two other people. Although his memory of the event is fragmentary, it is embedded in his adult psyche, leaving him with a longing for his mother and an aversion to violence uncommon among his generation in that time and place. Clay voluntarily embraces the life of his community, going to work in the coal mines, spending his weekends drinking and dancing in the local honkytonk with his best friend Cake and walking the mountains he loves so deeply. He yearns for something more, but it is not a yearning that draws him away from his heritage. He wants to keep the celebratory life-affirming best of it without giving in to the destructive tendencies that are whittling away at so many of his contemporaries. Nature, love and music permeate this novel, and if there are any more honestly drawn characters anywhere in literature, I want to meet them. This is the author's first novel, although you will find it listed as No. 3 in his Appalachian trilogy, because chronologically this story comes last in the series. ( )

Clay's quilt by Silas House
Clay lost his mother to the attack and now works in the coal mine.
He has many aunts that help as he's only 4 years old. He watches his uncle make quilts as he grows up and how he puts the pieces together that tell his story.
As he gets older he moves closer to the mine, where he works and is given his mother's memory box. ( )