Christy

Christy is a novel by the American writer Catherine Marshall, published in 1967. It is set in the fictional Appalachian village of Cutter Gap in Tennessee in 1912.

Christy Huddleson, nineteen years old and raised in a well-off family in Asheville, North Carolina, hears about an Appalachian mission programme at a revival meeting and decides to volunteer as a teacher. Her parents are unwilling at first, but she persists and travels to the remote community in eastern Tennessee, where she finds that a school is only one of the things the place needs.

The novel follows her first year there, including the customs of the community — the folk medicine, the folk beliefs and the moonshining that much of its economy rests on — and the effect all of it has on her own faith. Marshall based the book on her mother, Leonora Whitaker, who had taught in the Appalachian region as a young unmarried woman, and she left notes for a sequel that her family found many years afterwards.