Anna May Jones grew up in Soddy, Tennessee, a mining city in the Smoky Mountains, and while many teenagers her age help their parents to keep them out of the company's debt, Anna's sickly nature means she can't do too much to help her Ma and Pa. Thankfully, that is all about to change as Anna's mother's half-sister is insisting that the young girl move to live with her to be trained as a Root Woman just like Aunt Jinny. Jinny has a pretty good idea why Anna is so sickly, and she believes that getting the girl out of the poisoned town near the mines will be just what she needs to start getting stronger. To Anna's surprise, as soon as she starts heading towards the small farm near Ducktown, she does get stronger and her perpetual sickness does seem to lessen.
What Anna doesn't know is that she has the potential to be an Earth Elemental Master and, like all Earth Mages, living near a sick land can make the mage sick as well, at least until she learns how to shield herself to withstand the ill effects. Upon arriving at Aunt Jinny's place, the older woman quickly confirms that not only does Anna have access to Earth magic, but she is powerful as well. Where Jinny only has enough "Glory" to help strengthen her potions and keep critters out of her garden, Anna has the potential to do much more.
Anna's health and magical abilities quickly rise, and in the process, she catches the eye of a strange magical being that calls herself Jolene. It is clear that this woman isn't human even though she looks it, and the sheer amount of magical abilities she has at her disposal is inspiring. Much to Jinny's chagrin, Jolene helps to teach Anna and while Jinny agrees that Anna could learn a lot from Jolene, there is the constant worry of annoying or angering the creature, and that is something Jinny warns Anna against over and over again.
Meanwhile, Anna's also caught the interest of a young man who is growing into a well respected sculptor in the area. As the young couple's love starts to blossom, they will find themselves caught in more than one net as both Jolene and a local magician from Ducktown start to lay down their own plans for the couple.
Like all of the Elemental Masters novels, Jolene is inspired by a fairy tale, in this case the Russian story of "The Mistress of the Copper Mountain" in which a magical being tempts a young man to leave his lover as a test of his true feelings. But, that's not all. Lackey takes the tale, sets it in East Tennessee, and also makes it a retelling of Dolly Parton's classic song of the same name. The Jolene character is described the same way Parton describes her and, at one point late in the book during the final confrontation, Lackey essentially steps through the events of the song, giving Dolly's story more than a casual nod.
While I enjoyed most aspects of Jolene: Elemental Masters, Book 15, there is one major problem with the book, and that is the dialogue, or more precisely, the dialect. Lackey tends to do really well with writing various dialects and really getting the feel of the accents down on paper. Unfortunately, everyone in this book, except for Jolene herself, speaks with a very thick broken, Southern dialect. Don't get me wrong, I could read it and follow along, I am from the South after all, but it was too much and made it hard to make any real progress in any one sitting. To make matters worse, Lackey also used a Southern slang word incorrectly all the time. Many of the characters would use "y'all" as a singular pronoun, and that just isn't right. "Y'all" is the contraction of "you all" and I have never heard it used otherwise. It sounds wrong and reads wrong to be used to reference only a single person, and the frequent use of it is more jarring than the dialect.
Now, before you tell me that maybe I just don't know about how the speech patterns sound in Soddy and Ducktown, Tennessee, I have to say that I actually live not too far from the current town of Soddy-Daisy (the municipality that grew out of that location) and while I haven't been to Ducktown specifically, I am familiar with the general area. We don't talk like that. Maybe... maybe the residents did a hundred or so years ago when this book takes place, but it just feels too wrong and I really doubt the singular "y'all" has ever been a thing, at least I can't find any real history of its use when I research the topic online.
Story wise, Jolene is a fun new direction to take the Elemental Masters series, especially since it delves into Native American magic, something only touched on briefly in a previous book. I wouldn't put it at the top of the series, but it is also far from the bottom, Steadfast's generally uninspired plot still holds that position for me. That being said, the dialogue choice for Jolene causes me to not think too fondly of this book as a whole, even though I love the way it weaves Dolly's story in with the classic fairy tale. If Lackey does decide to follow Anna after this adventure, I hope she can convince some Earth elementals to teach her some better English. Regardless, I will read what comes next, I just hope it won't rely so heavily on the dialect chosen here.
