Joseph Wyatt, Marshall University, author of The Millennium Man

I've read "hills" and it's wonderful. Anyone who came of age in small town, rural America will be put in touch with those days again, when they read it.

The book's style - individual short stories, woven into a fabric in which each episode touches upon the others, put me in mind of Mark Twain's travelogues, such as Roughing it.

It is the book that one wants to read as dusk settles on a soft summer evening, lost in reverie about what once was, and why it is seldom found anymore.

Thanks, Dwight.

Neil Bucklew, former president, West Virginia University

It was a great read. You do not have to be a West Virginian to connect with the tale of life in rural America in the middle of the 1900s and its list of characters. I found myself laughing out loud to my chagrin on the airplane.

I am sure everyone will have a favorite clip and mine was the revival meeting. I have been there and done that. It was great prose that captured the fear of being discovered in need of "saving".

Yvonne Daley, director of the Green Mountain Writers Conference and the author of Vermont Writers: A State of Mind and co-author of An Independent Man: Adventures of a Public Servant.

In In the Heart of the Hills, Dwight Harshbarger has captured not only the essence of life in a small West Virginia town but he has also courageously depicted the challenges that many Americans living between the early 1940s and the late 1950s had to face. In a series of linked stories, Harshbarger recreates the sweet sense of small town life. But he also dares to show us the dark underbelly of the south as residents of his fictional Kettle, West Virginia, act out their prejudices and fears. In so doing, Harshbarger shows that isolation is both good and bad; it both protects and distorts. His main character, Freddy Lemley, grows to understand that and more; he understands that the loss of the life he once took for granted may be sad, even tragic, but it also offers opportunity for growth and redemption -- and maybe true love.

William Abernathy, author of The Sin of Wages

Dwight's book is full of interesting and quirky characters. Many of them are familiar to me as a person who was raised in a rural small town. The book describes a simpler time and place that older readers will remember and that younger readers should know about.

Beth Sulzer-Azaroff, author of Who Killed My Daddy

Finished Freddie's Kettle and loved it. It is a touching, humorous, down-home sojourn in a world unfamiliar but generally endearing to me (other than the smallness and racism of some of the characters - but they make it real.) You write with charm and flair.

Bill Hopkins, Ph.D.

I loved In the Heart of the Hills. It is a collection of stand-alone chapters that combine to tell a sometime funny, sometimes sad, sometimes courageous, always graphic, completely ordinary, and deeply poignant story about Freddie, a boy growing up and finally grown in a small West Virginia town in the forties and ensuing decades. In fact, Freddie is still living. I know him. Many readers will know him too, in their friends, in their memories, in themselves. If you enjoy reminiscing about our small-town or rural lives, or if you want a vivid glimpse of important times gone by, or if you want lessons about parts of our national character, or if you simply enjoy well-told stories, you will love this book too.