Running on Red Dog Road

Author(s): Drema Hall Berkheimer
Publisher: Zondervan
Price: $1.99       (Aug 1 Only)

Publishers Weekly: Berkheimer candidly brings her personality to the page in this incredible journey from naivete to wide-eyed maturity. (April 2016)

Library Journal: Berkheimer’s homespun memoir provides a wistful look back at a simpler time. An appealing counterbalance to more dreary war-era accounts. (May 2016)

“Mining companies piled trash coal in a slag heap and set it ablaze. The coal burned up, but the slate didn’t. The heat turned it rose and orange and lavender. The dirt road I lived on was paved with that sharp-edged rock. We called it red dog. Grandma said, Don’t you go running on that red dog road. But I do.”

Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers cavort through Drema’s childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that reads like a novel, with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema’s coming of age is colored by tent revivals with Grandpa, poetry-writing hobos, and exotic carnivals, and through it all, she serves witness to a multi-generational family of saints and sinners whose lives defy the stereotypes. Just as she defies her own.