A PARCHMENT OF LEAVES, by Silas House, 2002.

Recommended by a friend and colleague, I found this novel to be a very moving and somewhat haunting story set in the Appalachian region of Kentucky during World War I. It involves a young man, Saul Sullivan, who is looking for work near Redbud Camp, and falls on sight for Vine, a young Cherokee girl who lives there. Even though his mother, the tiny but strong-willed Esme, is against the idea of mixed marriage, the two are wed and come to live on God's Creek, Saul's homeplace. There, Esme and Aaron, Saul's younger brother, take to Vine very quickly (and she to them) and they form a close family unit. However, Vine has a bad feeling about Aaron, as she realizes over time that his admiration of her turns to an obsession. When Aaron leaves home for an extended period and then returns with a bride of his own, when Saul is forced to do war work in another county for nearly a year, and Vine's parents are forced to move to North Carolina, relationships change and conditions deteriorate within the family until disastrous violence erupts and Vine is forced to live with a terrible secret. Only months after Saul comes home for good  and Esme has died is she able to finally unburden herself by forgiving others as well as herself.
The author has a wonderful writing style--you can hear the birdcalls and smell the mountain air when reading this book. It's poignant and evocative, filled with rich historical details of life in rural Kentucky during the early years of the last century, especially how women lived and worked, gave birth, loved, and died. His characters are real: the hardworking and stable Saul, who loves Vine and his family; the matriarchal and kind Esme; dreamy, bitter, and self absorbed Aaron; the tough talking and funny midwife Serena; Aaron's wife, Aidia, who so much resembles Vine and suffers for it; and Vine herself, patient, loving, faithful, haunted, determined to be true to herself, one who loves nature and her people, yet has to be separated from her people and see her old home destroyed. The novel deals with so many things: the idea of Cherokee culture being slowly destroyed from within by the older people refusing to talk about it as well as from outside forces, lumbering in the mountains and the making of turpentine for the war effort, the isolation of the hollers, religion in the characters' lives, issues of race. The author's use of accurate dialect and his descriptive passages of things natural add so much to the feel of the story, too. One of my favorite lines is "Maybe the trees were God." Overall, an emotional, thoughtful  and beautifully written novel. Highly recommend it.