Published: April 01. 2010 2:00AM

Reviewed by Ashley Warlick

No matter what, we’re always going to read.

In a day and age like this one, where the form that reading takes seems to be in constant flux, it’s good to see Greenville sign up for another year of the Amazing Read. Since its beginning in 2008, with native Tommy Hays’ novel “The Pleasure Was Mine,” the Greenville County Library program has offered us, as a community, the chance to experience the same story, then meet the author, ask questions, hear secrets, and learn about the background and history that underpins it. Such a program is a privilege not to be missed.

“Velva Jean Learns to Drive” is the first novel by experienced nonfiction writer Jennifer Niven. It’s set in the Blue Ridge Mountains not far from here, in the 1930s, when those mountains were just opening up to the world through the building on the visionary (and frightening) Blue Ridge Parkway. Velva Jean Hart lives with her entire extended family on Fair Mountain, outside Alluvial, North Carolina, where “the dirt still glittered with gold dust.” Her grandfather is a healer, her grandmother a midwife, her father a buckdancer, her mother a churchgoing woman, one brother a gifted at panning for gold, one brother at carving stone, her older married sister bound and determined to carry on the way of life they were born into: raising children, canning beans, keeping house and hearth together. Velva Jean has other dreams. She’s been blessed with a beautiful voice, cut her teeth on the shape-note singing of the region, and now writes her own ballads so that one day she might sing on the stage at the Grand Ole Opry.

In the tradition of Appalachian novelists like Robert Morgan, Ron Rash and Silas House, trouble finds Velva Jean early in her story, and becomes her constant companion. Shortly after she’s baptized in the Three Gum River, her father disappears on one of his freewheeling junkets and Velva Jean’s mother takes to her bed. No healers can save her, and she dies of what appears to be grief before her husband can return home. As the family struggles to hold together, the coming parkway seems to threaten their entire mountain way of life.

In the face of this, Velva Jean proves herself to be a plucky and determined young woman. She befriends the Woodcarver, a rumored murderer living as a hermit on Devil’s Courthouse; he becomes her confidant and supplier of homespun advice. She marries tent preacher Harley Bright because she loves him, even as the life of a preacher’s wife leaves little room for her dreams of singing. Her path may not be straight, but she remains true. Niven spins a story with appeal for a wide range of reading tastes and temperatures, a heroine who endures and escapes, even as she holds her history dear.