BookBrowse Reviews The Caretaker by Ron Rash

Ron Rash is renowned for his writing about Appalachia, but his latest book, The Caretaker, begins halfway across the world from it, with Jacob Hampton on guard duty at the Korean border in the frigid March of 1951. "He just had to survive. … Getting home was what mattered." In just two months, his wife is to give birth to their first child. Jacob's parents, who own a sawmill and shop, have strongly disapproved of Naomi Clarke, a semi-literate Tennessee seventeen-year-old whom Jacob met when she came to Blowing Rock, North Carolina as a hotel maid the previous summer. When they eloped, Jacob was disinherited by his parents, so while he has been away at war he has tasked his friend Blackburn Gant, the local cemetery caretaker, with looking after his pregnant wife.

In the tense opening sequence, Jacob is attacked by a North Korean soldier and their hand-to-hand combat by the side ...