The Diggins of Pone Hill - Hardcover

by Carol Young (Author), Richard Young (Author)

On Pone Hill, "No coal, no bread" isn't just something the grown-ups say. It's the rule that decides whether thirteen McFadden kids go to bed with full stomachs-or not at all.

Ten-year-old Opie is finally old enough to carry lunch down into her family's coal mine, a dark maze where one wrong step could mean disaster. But the scariest thing in the tunnels isn't the dark. It's the chalk-drawn Eye staring from the wall...and the warning note that says:

THE EYE WATCHES. GET OUT... NOW.

Soon the Eye is everywhere-on barns, on fences, on a stranger's shiny lapel pin. Accidents start to pile up that don't feel like accidents at all: cut fences, a broken ladder, a "mysterious" barn fire. A powerful coal company called Keystone wants Pone Hill, and they're willing to scare poor families off their own land to get it cheap.

Opie's father has only a little mine, a shaky lamp, and his own two hands. But the McFaddens have something the Eye men don't: a hill full of neighbors, a girl named Tiz with a notebook that never lies, and kids brave enough to set skunk-powered traps on the mine road.

As coal runs low and winter closes in, Opie and her family must decide how far they'll go to protect their home-and learn that sometimes the strongest weapon against fear is the truth written down and spoken out loud.

Heart-pounding and hopeful, The Diggins of Pone Hill shines a lantern on one coal-mining family's fight to keep what's theirs, and on the small, stubborn bravery it takes to stand up to big men in shiny cars.