Catherine Astl’s Mountain Mulekick is a captivating novel. Using actual historical facts as well as some creativeness with fiction, she takes readers straight to the rugged landscapes of the Great Smoky Mountains. From the first page to the last, Astl’s paints a vivid image of the moonshine era in Cades Cove and Chestnut Flats. Astl breathes life into the characters and events that shaped this chapter of American history.
What struck me most about Mountain Mulekick was the sense of place and time. It felt rife with authenticity. Astl invites readers to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of a bygone era, I can only imagine how much research went into telling this tale. As someone with a deep appreciation for history and historical fiction, I was captivated by Astl’s portrayal of a community grappling with questions of tradition, identity, and freedom. Mountain Mulekick is a great read that will keep readers engrossed from start to finish.
Mountain Mulekick
“Taste it, and man, you got yourself a mulekick. Gets ya just like a mule kickin’ you when you’re loadin’ him up.”
“The vices of humans have a wonderful flavor to them, but also a violent and sad bitterness that can never be washed away.”
Cades Cove is known to millions as a beautiful mountain valley tucked within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But before its eventual inclusion in the park’s opening in 1937, this stunning place saw a successful and industrious society for 119 years. And in its southwest corner, a suburb cropped up called Chestnut Flats, whose legacy of moonshine and illicit activities would steer the two communities through decades of conflicting ideals, each having vastly different interpretations of the American spirit of freedom.
Moonshine has a way of tugging at people’s emotions. Some say it’s evil, some sympathize with the idea of doing what one wants on one’s own land. Some say it’s good and even patriotic to rail against the government’s taxation; some say it’s wicked and wrong. Which is it then? Within the pages of Mountain Mulekick, readers are tasked with the heavy choice between the pull of peaceful and orderly freedom and the equally inspirational glamour of free will; the same choices that faced the people of Cades Cove and Chestnut Flats so long ago.
Exhaustively researched and expertly written, all people and major events are true, with historical facts and exact quotes taken from some of the best sources, some from the very memoirs of the people themselves.
Just as Oliver’s Crossing and Gatlin’s Gateway invited you to pull up a chair and stay awhile, Mountain Mulekick keeps you there, urging you to “stop and look around for a bit…lie back on the earth and its soft ridges will fill you with their memories. You will feel it most when the sun hides for another day and the moon nudges itself in for a closer look.
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Catherine Astl is the bestselling author of Smoky Mountain Historical Fiction: Oliver’s Crossing, Gatlin’s Gateway, Mountain Mulekick, and more to come!
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