Review: Donald Secreast's SOLAR-POWERED SOUTHERN BELLE

 

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 two collections (The Rat Made Light and White Trash; Red Velvet), without ever losing their sense of place, the connection between characters and their environments that is such a hallmark of Appalachian literature. In stories such as “Woman in the Wind” and “Women Like Islands,” protagonists seek answers to questions within themselves in landscapes as varied as the North Carolina coast during hurricane season to Hawaiian Islands facing the omnipresent deluge of tourists from the mainland. But what unites all these stories is the beating, longing human hearts at the center of each, hearts any reader who has lived beyond childhood will find vividly relatable.