A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill by Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice

Description

Billy-Goat Hill is the steep, sunlit shelf of Louisville where the poor of the city live pitched against the sky, and Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice — the author who made Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch a household name — returns to that territory for a romance as bright and headlong as its springtime opening. The novel opens in “gay, irresponsible, Southern springtime,” with the brown river below and the hill bursting into green, and it keeps that mood of freshness through every chapter.

The story turns on Mary Vance, a girl of the hill, and on the pride and prettiness that make her a neighborhood legend. Around her, Rice assembles the crowded, talkative life of the hill: feuds and friendships, makeshift households, love declared shyly over fences, and the small crises that decide whole futures. Her sympathy is unforced and her comedy warm — she treats her people without condescension and without sentimentality.

Written at the height of her fame, A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill shows the qualities that made Rice one of the best-loved American storytellers of her day: a quick ear for dialect, an eye for telling domestic detail, and a firm belief that character is destiny.

Why readers pick it up

• The warm, witty voice of a beloved American regional storyteller at full stretch.
• A Kentucky love story with real stakes, told against a vividly drawn hilltop community.
• A gentler, sunnier counterweight to the darker Southern fiction of the same era.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition presents the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation tuned for phone, tablet, and e-reader. Rice’s dialect dialogue is set with care so the music of her writing survives the transfer to digital reading.