For readers, fiction can be both a window and a mirror.

Like a window, it reveals worlds, lives, ideas, emotions and experiences we might never have known or understood.

Like a mirror, it reflects our own world, life, ideas, emotions and experiences, sometimes providing validation of our own existence when the image we see of ourselves is positive, and sometimes proving painful when that reflection reminds us of our shortcomings, weaknesses and mistakes.

When I read the fiction of Kentucky’s favorite literary son, Silas House, I feel as if I am looking into a myriad of mirrors, in which I see reflected myself, generations of my family and the many members, both past and present, of the small rural Kentucky community from which I came.

Recently, I re-read House’s “Eli the Good,” his first “young adult” novel, which was originally published in hardback in 2009 but only became available in paperback this spring.

The novel is set in America’s bicentennial year of 1976 and is narrated by the adult Eli Book, who recalls the story of his 10th summer.

The United States is turning 200 years old, and, ironically, Eli’s Vietnam War veteran father, Stanton, begins to have violent flashbacks of the war.

Eli’s mother, Loretta, seems too preoccupied with her overwhelming love for her husband and her concern for his mental health to offer adequate attention to her son, and Eli’s rebellious teenage sister, Josie, learns that Stanton Book isn’t her biological father.

Eli’s outspoken, anti-war activist aunt, Nell, comes home to Kentucky suffering from her own secret physical illness, and, finally, the parents of Eli’s best friend, mentor and confidant Edie, who lives next door, decide to get a divorce.

Eli spends this historic summer riding bicycles and listening to pop music on his transistor radio; communing with his beloved trees; and watching “The Waltons” on television. (Like John Boy, he hopes one day to be a writer.)

Eli painstakingly records all of his observations in his journal, and reads, upon Edie’s recommendation, “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” – appropriately, another diary of a child of war.

Eli secretly peruses the letters his father wrote to Loretta while he was serving in Vietnam, and most important, he eavesdrops on the conversations of his elders in an effort to learn more about his mysterious family, particularly his troubled and distant dad – a point at which I felt my face flush with heat as I recalled an incident at approximately the same age as Eli when I covertly overheard a conversation between my grandmother and my aunts and learned that my maternal grandfather was not my biological grandfather, that my mother and her sisters were only half siblings.

What I like most about “Eli the Good” is the dramatic intersection of “big” history (the social, cultural and political) and “little” history (the personal, familial or “grass-roots”) that informs the book.

Also, I like that in the novel, House evokes and pays homage to authors and fiction that he loves and by which he has been influenced: Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”; Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”; Earl Hamner Jr.’s “Spencer’s Mountain” (the novel on which “The Waltons” television series was based); and the aforementioned “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.”

House is the nationally known, best-selling author of three other award-winning novels, “Clay’s Quilt” (2001), “A Parchment of Leaves” (2003) and “The Coal Tattoo” (2004); two plays, “The Hurting Part” (2005) and “Long Time Traveling” (2009); and “Something’s Rising” (2009), a creative nonfiction book about social protest co-authored with Jason Howard.

His next young adult novel, “Same Sun Here,” co-written with Neela Vaswani, will be published in early 2012, and he is currently at work on his fifth novel, “Evona Darling.”

House serves as the NEH chair in Appalachian studies at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University’s MFA in creative writing program.

He is the father of two daughters and divides his time between London and Berea.

— Review by Jim Browning, Barnes & Noble Booksellers.