[In Black Mountain Breakdown] Lee Smith does not show us life through a filter of literary allusions or devices. Instead, she gives us the sharp, sweet sensations of a life-hungry adolescent and the fresh poetry of Appalachian names…. There is no retrospective frame around the story of Crystal Spangler, so what happens to her is not a foregone conclusion…. We experience her life as she does, and it surprises us at every turn; we feel we are in the presence of someone "fully alive … more than real."

As a teen-ager in Black Rock, Va., Crystal is aroused to fear and ecstasy by the scary poems her father reads her in the darkened front room where he has withdrawn to drink and dream. After her father's death, and her rape by his retarded brother, Crystal is driven to seek out feelings of intensity: She sleeps with a "bad boy...