"Little Martha Nell Hobbs, the name shortened by her parents to Marnel because that was easier to say, had heard the story of her miracle birth hundreds of times growing up...."

"Miracle of the Hills," by Fayetteville resident Kay Smith Holt, is the story of Marnel Hobbs, born in the obscurity of a Tennessee "holler" and in ignorance as abject as the region's poverty. Her saga is simple enough: From her earliest years she aspires to overcome her humble origins. In love with a distant cousin, she nonetheless snatches the opportunity to leave the hills as the wife of a wealthy Chicago teacher.

World War II turns the lives of the remote hill folk upside down as surely as it did those of the distant upper class. Marnel responds to the tugging of her spirit to return to her true home and her true love.

There is a timelessness and a universality that give this yarn its appeal. Its characters are every bit as bizarre as the characters that really do inhabit the hills and hamlets of many rural people's memories.

Holt has drawn from her own memory the hillbilly twang of the Tennessee hills, and it is no doubt authentic, if sometimes tedious. As she speaks, Marnel self-consciously corrects her own grammar: "Folks had blocks of ice in their homes in Chicago, not layin' out meltin' in a spring house down the hillside, if they was...were...lucky enough to have any ice a'tall." "They had drug stores where a bidey...body...person...could buy Ipana tooth paste and hair curlers."

Instead of centering the author's point of view on a single character, Holt pulls her readers inside the minds of nearly every character in a richly populated book. She is at her best when she takes the perspective of an intelligent mature woman, as in the scenes that take place before and after Marnel's beloved mother-in-law dies. She also does especially well with an educated, upper-class school teacher.

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Kay Smith Holt neither affirms nor denies that "Miracle of the Hills" is autobiographical, but comparisons of her with her heroine, Marnel Hobbs, are tempting. Born near Clifton, Tenn., and married at 15, she had two children "right away," she said in a recent telephone interview. "I left the hills young, and it was soon obvious that the marriage was not working. With no education, what was I going to do with two babies?"

She did something right: "My oldest son is now an M.D.," she said.

As a teen-aged mother in El Paso, she got her high school diploma, then went to secretarial school. Now armed with knowledge also precious to Marnel Holt added to her arsenal when she "paid $6 down on a Smith-Corona, swung it up on the table and said to my husband, 'This is your Armageddon.'

"When I got a job, [the marriage] was over."

Noticing that women with degrees were making four or five times what she was, she went to junior college, then to Georgia State University for both undergraduate and graduate studies. The result: a 20-year career teaching business English at Massey Junior College in Atlanta. Holt is now "in another marriage that's working well," she said. "I would probably never have written the book, but in the early 1990s, my husband retired from Delta, and we moved to Tennessee, where I became executive director of the Wayne County Chamber of Commerce.

"Those precious people...still speak the way they did when I lived there," she continued. "It all came rushing back.

"I wrote the book, but never sent it in. I heard that the average book gets 18 rejections, and I thought I'd be under the ground before I got accepted, so I published it myself."

Fayette businesswoman and Sunday school classmate Barbara Cannington read the book, and liked it. She offered to become Holt's agent, and the two made up dramatizations of scenes from the book. Soon "every family in church owned the book."

It needs revision, Holt said, adding that she was disappointed in the way it printed. She is hoping the success it has had will attract the attention of a "real" publisher.

Meanwhile, it is available through Cannington, who promotes it with Holt's "little presentations." Senior groups especially enjoy the memories the book inspires, Holt said, and "I love talking about something I know about."

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