Wiley Cash might know the kinds of people he writes about in his debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, but the voices of his first-person narrators sound affected. To channel small-town North Carolina folk, Wiley carpet bombs the narration's sixth grade-level speech with double negatives and other idiomatic devices. This impression, omnipresent from the outset, hampered my enjoying the read. Beyond that, the action is largely predictable and the characters flat. Three voices narrate the plot: a young boy, an old woman, and a late middle-aged sheriff.A fundamentalist, snake-handling minister is the villain; the protagonists are individually overmatched against him. But together the confluence of choices people make leave the villain dead and the fallen redeemed. A Land More Kind Than Home isn't a bad book, necessarily. It's just immature.
