Skip to Main Content

Book Festival @ the Roberts Library: 2014 Guest Author

Playlist for The River Witch

Music plays an important part in The River Witch.  Below is a playlist from Kimberly Brock's web site:

Oh Cumberland Matracea Berg and Emmylou Harris (The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)

Down in the Valley  The Head and the Heart

Salty South Indigo Girls (Acoustic Version)

Somewhere to Lay My Head Florida Folk Life Collection

Flood Waters Anna Kline and the Grits and Soul Band

She’s Not Innocent Antigone Rising

All Roads to the River Kathy Mattea

Wayfaring Stranger Emmylou Harris

I Find Jesus The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Fleet of Hope Indigo Girls (Acoustic Version)

Amazing Grace Florida Alabama Progressive Seven Shape Note Singers

Forever Young Bob Dylan (Biograph version)

I’ll Fly Away Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch

Here I Am Mary Chapin Carpenter

Wellington’s Weel Florida Folk Life Collection

Just Breathe Pearl Jam

Jubilee Mary Chapin Carpenter

Wagon Wheel The Old Crow Medicine Show

About the Author

Kimberly Brock is a native southerner and former special needs educator. Brock credits teachers and librarians for encouraging a love of story and character, which led to her study ofliterature and theater. After several out-of-state moves for herhusband’s career, she wrote a short piece of fiction that led to her first publication in an anthology. 

She acts surprised by her literary accomplishments, but doesn’t feel undeserving. “I work hard every day,” Brock says. “It’s a balancing act between the writing and my family. I appreciate both as great gifts in my life.”
 
You can visit her blog and website, kimberlybrockbooks.com, where her sense of humor comes out, along with a desire to support other authors and especially women’s voices. “I think people either embrace the capacity for wonder, or they fear it,”
Brock says. “I wanted to explore that from the heart, the dark places grief can take you, the courage it takes to heal. But ultimately, my novel is a love story about hope.”
 
(from her web site)

About the Book

Award-winning author Kimberly Brock delights in obscure myths and
magic, and uses the truth that lies somewhere in between to inspire
her fiction.

In Brock’s debut novel,The River Witch, a good measure of gentle craziness
and well-meaning magic are called for when Roslyn Byrne’s career as a professional
ballet dancer is ended with a car wreck and a miscarriage, leaving her lost and grieving.
She needs a new path, but she doesn’t have the least idea how or where to
start. With some shoving from her very Southern mama, she immures
herself for the summer on Manny’s Island, Georgia, one of the Sea Isles,
to recover. There Roslyn finds a ten-year-old girl, Damascus, who brings alligators,
pumpkins and hoodoo into her sorry life.

Roslyn rents a house from Damascus’s family, the Trezevants, a strange
bunch. One of the cousins, Nonnie, who works in the family’s market,
sees things Roslyn is pretty sure she shouldn’t, and knows things
regular people don’t. Between the Trezevant secrets and Damascus’s
blatant snooping and meddling, Roslyn finds herself caught in a
mysterious stew of the past and present, the music of the river, the
dead and the dying who haunt the riverbank. Brock spins a poignant
tale of characters who reckon with histories replete with regret and
secrets to discover what they want in life.

“People either struggle to escape and deny their eccentricities, or
become desperate to hold on to their superstitions and nostalgia,”
Brock says. “If you’re brave, you own up to your inherited crazy. If
you’re southern, you wink and call it magic.”


(from www.kimberlybrock.com)