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Review: Donald Secreast's SOLAR-POWERED SOUTHERN BELLE

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  Donald Secreast’s The Solar-Powered Southern Belle is a beautiful and moving collection where characters reach for, and sometimes achieve, transcendence from the lives they’ve created for themselves. In “Preserving the Integrity of the Goshen Valley Dead,” Romulus Anderson, son of a locally famous moonshiner, must solve the mystery of how two of his family’s tombstones wound up in a touristy Blowing Rock antique shop, and in doing so must confront both his own legacy as well as how much the landscape, and the illicit products sold there, have changed. Camilla Marley, protagonist of “Nectars of the Wild,” finds herself restless with her life as a maker of craft jams and jellies and guilty over an episode of adultery she’d hoped would offer her a moment’s escape until she discovers another chance through the search for a missing goat.   In fluid and evocative prose, Secreast’s stories leap from the confines of Appalachian Hibriten County, NC, the settings for his first tw...
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Before reading Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain ...

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Before reading Charles Frazier's 1997 novel Cold Mountain , literature was something I had come to have affinity for but still saw as something foreign, exotic. My senior year of high school, my English teacher had told me that he thought I had a mind that would enjoy, as he put it, "literature," which I understood to be very different from the Tom Clancy books I had read as a child (I was precocious in that regard, and thanks in no small part to Clancy's influence I still curse far more often than most) or the history books and fantasy novels that had sustained me throughout high school. Proud of his belief that I was capable of appreciating "literature," I checked Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls  out from the library because I recognized the title from one of the pieces we'd read in that English class, and found that the teacher was right. I loved the fact that the novel ended with the protagonist completing his mission - bombing a fasci...
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Location: Greensboro, NC, USA
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