Melinda Clayton: 8 books

Billy May Platte is a half Irish, half Cherokee Appalachian woman who learned the hard way that 1940s West Virginia was no place to be different. As Billy May explains, "We was sheltered in them hills.  We didn't know much of nothin' about life outside of them mountains.  I did not know...

As recounted in Appalachian Justice, Jessie is an adult survivor of horrendous childhood abuse.  At the age of thirteen, she was rescued by reclusive mountain woman Billy May Platte.  Now forty-seven, Jessie is outwardly successful but inwardly struggles to reconcile the broken pieces of...

Beth Sloan has spent the majority of her life trying to escape the memories of a difficult childhood. Born into the infamous Pritchett family of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, she grew up hard, surrounded not only by homemade stills and corn liquor, but by an impoverished family that more often than...

On the anniversary of her husband's death, forty-nine-year-old Emily Holt runs away, leaving an unmade bed, an unlocked house, two college-aged sons, and an overabundance of bad memories. Struggling to make peace with the death of a husband who'd been lost to mental illness, she vows to drive...

Blessed Are the Wholly Broken is the harrowing story of a modern family in the midst of self-destruction. After the heartbreak of losing their newborn son to a previously undiagnosed genetic condition, Phillip and Anna Lewinsky manage to pick up the pieces of their broken lives and move forward,...

On a sweltering July morning in rural Tennessee, fifty-year-old Rebecca Reynolds visits the family farm, where she literally stumbles across the mutilated bodies of her parents and younger sister, a sister who had spent life in a wheelchair after a birth fraught with complications. Rebecca's...

On a beautiful fall evening, in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, five-year-old Bobby Clark is kidnapped by his estranged father, a shiftless man with a history of domestic violence and drug abuse. Bobby’s twin brother Ricky watches, terrified, from his hiding place behind the bougainvillea,...

The Cedar Hollow Series features the residents of the tiny coal-mining town of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, over the span of eighty years. Appalachian Justice chronicles the life of Billy May Platte, who, in 1945 when she was fourteen years old and orphaned, was brutally attacked by a group...