Book Reviews
What Lee Smith does best of all in this multigeneration family history is to capture the voices that tell her story...her mimicry is perfect. And voices aren't all that Lee Smith does well. The lore of the Virginia mountain terrain seems second nature to her.... It's also part of Lee Smith's talent to make such folk tales [as the Cantrells'] remain plausible as they get passed from generation to generation.... Unfortunately, Oral History is more successful at exploring the origin of the Cantrell curse than it is at translating its effects into the present.... It may be that Miss Smith is leaning over backward to avoid the melodrama that marred her last novel, Black Mountain Breakdown.... If that's the case, then she's gone too far.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times
Recreates a vanished way of life with stunning authenticity.
Philadelphia Inquirer
A novel as dark, winding, complicated as the hill country itself.... You could make comparisons to Faulkner and Carson McCullers, to The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Wuthering Heights. You could employ all those familiar ringing terms of praise: "rare," "brilliant," "unforgettable." But Lee Smith and Oral History make you wish that all those phrases were fresh and new, that all those comparisons had never before been made. This is a novel deserving of unique praise.
Village Voice
Enchanting.... [I]nterwoven with the moving and deeply human recital of loves and losses are the folklore, the music, the scenery of the region—one can almost hear the twang of the banjos and the high nasal voices; one almost breathes in the air of Hoot Owl Holler.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
A fine novel.... Wonderfully energetic.... A corner of American that I'm coming to think of as Lee Smith country.
Harper's