Review of "Dogs" by Abigail DeWitt

Dogs a novel by Abigail DeWitt

Review by Joy Boothe

In the prologue DeWitt’s protagonist Molly tells us, “What breaks my heart is the begging, the shamelessness of a dog’s desire. A dog will follow you around, matching its pace to yours-only a little more eager-even after you’ve pushed it away. Say no like you mean it and it follows you with its eyes, whimpering, thumping its tale.” What breaks Molly’s heart about dogs will end up enlightening and breaking the reader’s heart about Molly.

Abigail DeWitt is a brave and as Lee Smith stated “extravagantly talented” writer. Like all really good stories Dogs has often startling layers of meaning along with humor that rings unfailingly true. Avoid gulping down this richly crafted novel. Sip slowly and much will be revealed. Molly Moore (self-proclaimed bad girl) is fourteen as the story begins. In Hebrew, Molly is the diminutive of Mary-also meaning wished for child-also meaning rebellion and bitter. The English meaning of Molly is “of the sea”. Dewitt indeed takes us diving as deeply as we are willing to go to look behind the many masks Molly puts on to survive emotionally unavailable, flawed and ultimately very human parents. Attempting to find her place amidst the chaos and often parallel struggles of her four siblings and best friend Becky-Molly while blessed with intelligence and what remains of her childhood innocence explores and escapes by playing in the yard with Buttercup her dog moving on heartbreakingly soon tothe escapes of her family and friends -sex, food, tobacco and alcohol amongst them. DeWitt’s strong narrative coupled with sensitivity and insight into her characters keeps Dogs from the stereotypes sometimes found in coming of age stories. Told in a series of flashbacks when as an adult and parent Molly begins to face the truths of her life she meets head on with one of her biggest challenges- how to come to terms with the knowledge that her father a highly respected judge has committed and kept hidden a heinous crime. “He’s dead himself now-he died in the crook of my arm this morning and now, if I want , I can prove what people only thought… .”

Set in the hot political and physical landscape of Texas in the 1970’s and ‘80s the heat generated byAbigail Dewitt’s Dogs will linger long after you put her book down.

The Secret Gardeners Critique Group

This critique group will present a panel discussion at the festival about how to form a critique group -- what they've learned from each other and how they support each other as they seek publication. This was first posted on Constance Lombardo's blog.

THE SECRET GARDENERS

Five years ago, I moved to Asheville, joined SCBWI and decided to form a critique group. I found another writer/illustrator with the same goal. We scheduled and advertised our first meeting. Asheville is full of artists and writers, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by the amount of people who showed up– ten, I think. A mix of picture book to YA writers and illustrators. Wow, I thought, this is going to be easy!

We worked out some logistics: we’d meet twice a month at our favorite local bookstore, Malaprops, we’d read our work and offer feedback at meetings, leaving the first 20 minutes for chatting (hopefully on book-related subjects!) And we would use the ‘sandwich’ rule - a positive statement about the writing first, then discuss what might need work, close with another positive statement.

Four years later, the last survivor from that first group to our current configuration is me. People moved away. One of us had twins. Someone else had surgery. Others decided they didn’t have time for the group. Change is part of life, right?

Over the years, we’ve had people show up once, after being told that a commitment was required to share work for feedback, and then never return. (We now have a rule that you must attend at least one meeting before you can share.)
We’ve had people show up only when they wanted to share their own work. (new rule: you must attend at least one of our twice a month meetings regularly to remain in the group)

We had one woman who left the group, saying we were all mean. (more conversation on keeping things positive)
We’ve had some intense chatters. (I’ve been guilty of this at times. Reminders about staying on-topic)
And we’ve had some serious personality clashes. New York personalities (myself and others) vs. Southern personalities. We’re still working on that one.

What have we done best over the years?

About a year ago, when our group hit eight committed writers and illustrators who attend and share regularly, we decided to close the group. Most of us are SCBWI members and it’s a requirement for any new members, when we do have an opening. We wrote down a list of Intentions and Rules, including some previously mentioned. We now post our work (especially longer YA or MG chapters) the week before we meet.

We’ve had local authors (Allan Wolf, Alan Gratz) and a local illustrator (Laura Bryant) speak to us about their journeys. A local editor (Joy Neaves) also spoke to our group. We’ve learned a lot from these meetings. And we picked a name. That was interesting. As we threw out ideas, I realized that I am attached to my concept of the group and that some of the names were just not acceptable to me. (New rule: any major change had to be ok’d by all members.) We made a list of potential names:

• Monkeys with Typewriters
• Make Way for Madeline
• Wonderlanders
• The Inksters
• The Secret Gardeners

We all voted and happily agreed. We are now The Secret Gardeners.

An illustrator from our group (Holly McGee) was pulled from the slush pile to illustrate her first picture book from Kane/Miller, Hush Little Beachcomber by Dianne Moritz. (Hooray!) Author/illustrator Kit Grady has a new book out, A Necklace for Jiggsy (Hooray!) Megan Shepherd’s YA novel The Madman’s Daughter helped her secure an excellent agent and will be published by Balzer & Bray in 2013, as the first of a three book deal (Yahoo!) And we recently had another published author join us, Karen Miller (Monsters and Water Beasts: Creatures of Fact or Fiction?) We’ve been published in our Carolinas chapter newsletter The Pen & Palette and in the SCBWI Bulletin, cheering each other on all the way. We celebrate each other through our successes and commiserate over our (numerous!) rejection letters. We share knowledge (agent lists) and ask questions (how to write an effective query?) We attend conferences together and hang out in the hotel bar talking late into the night. Sometimes we have pillow fights.
We’ve come to know each other, our work, our writing/illustrating styles, our strengths and weaknesses, and our dreams. We’ve come to appreciate each other, to understand what we’re each trying to accomplish, to be encouraging, and to offer the kind of feedback that makes us all work harder to deliver our best.

And we have fun! We went to see Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix together when it first came out. We’ve met for birthday celebration meetings at the Chocolate Lounge (which is as wonderful as it sounds!) We celebrated Megan’s recent three-book deal at a local Champagne bar.

The Secret Gardeners is more than a fabulous critique group. We are also a group of wonderfully supportive friends.

From WNC Magazine

Along About Sundown, a play about the life of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, hits close to home

WRITTEN BY: RITA LARKIN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY: HUGH MORTON

Even with his legacy resonating in each note sung and strummed during the venerable Mountain Dance & Folk Festival, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who founded the annual event in 1928, can seem a distant character in our history. Lunsford recorded nearly 350 songs, stories, and square dance calls, and influenced the likes of Bob Dylan and Robert Plant, who covered his song Get Along Home Cindy on his latest album.

Luckily, his great-nieces, Brenda Lunsford Lilly and Sandra Lunsford Mason were among the crowds who came to the festival back in the day. Lilly, who lives in Burnsville, recalls those days sitting on the stage, clogging, and generally “pretending to be musical,” she says with a laugh. “We grew up with that music. We, unfortunately, got no musical skills, but we got the storytelling gene.”

The sisters have put their knack for storytelling to use by ensuring pivotal players and moments of local history aren’t forgotten. Lilly, a screenwriter who returned to Burnsville after working in Los Angeles, co-wrote the book Tom Dooley, about the Wilkes County man convicted of murdering his wife. Sandra wrote Return of an Angel, an original play about Thomas Wolfe. Now the sisters have collaborated to pen a Parkway Playhouse original production,Along About Sundown, about their great-uncle Bascom, known as the Minstrel of Appalachia. “I felt an obligation to make sure his story keeps getting told,” says Lilly.

The play, which opens in August, is told as one eventful evening in Lunsford’s life (he was also a lawyer and politician, among other callings), with music performed by another family member, Tomi Lynn Lunsford. “People would come to his house, roll up the carpet, and start playing,” says Lilly. “This is the authentic way to tell his story.”Coming on the heels of the festival, August 4-6 in Asheville, the timing couldn’t be more appropriate and ensures the minstrel’s legacy plays on.

August 26-September 3
Parkway Playhouse, Burnsville; Thursday, Friday &
Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Sunday, 5 p.m.; $12-$22;
(828) 682-4285; www.parkwayplayhouse.com

Review of "Waking" by Ron Rash

Review by Maria Rouphail

There is much to commend in Ron Rash’s latest volume of poetry, Waking (Hub City Press, 2011). In this collection of lyric and narrative poems celebrating the region of the Blue Ridge Mountains—its terrain, its people and their histories both shared and personal—Rash is particularly arresting in his contextualizing of stories and in his effective turns of the phrase. “Resolution,” is the first poem and it is set in italics, thus serving as an epigraph and an invocation for the whole of the work. Like the waters it describes in the opening lines, “Resolution” is dynamic both visually and aurally:

The surge and clatter of whitewater conceals

how shallow underneath is, how quickly gone.

The short vowels and hard consonants in the words clatter, conceal, shallow, and quickly, effectively suggest the “noise” of rapidly moving water over a rocky river bottom. The poem then moves to invite a withdrawal to a quieter place in the water where life abounds:

Leave that noise behind.

Come herewhere the water is slow, and clear.

This is the dwelling of crawfish that “prance” and sculpen that “blend with stone.” The reader is enticed to remain in this quieter, clearer space that promises to yield the rewards of careful and sympathetic observation. Which is pretty much what a good book of poems accomplishes in creating a contemplative zone for observing and wondering at life—our life—in its habitat.

Waking is not a nature book, per se, but Rash presents the domain of Appalachian forests, hills, valleys, streams, swamps, and sluices as integral to shaping the resident human community. The intercalation of the natural and human worlds is Rash’s principal subject. A governing consciousness pervades the work, that of an adult recuperating seminal events, of rediscovering a world of parents, ancestors, siblings, town characters, all of whom have “made” him. In “First Memory,” the speaker observes the dazzling spectacle of flitting dragon flies: “Their backs catch light, purple like church glass / . . . A green smell simmers shallows.” “[Purple] like church glass” approximates child-speak. The present tense verbs and Rash’s particular syntax that, for example, has “a green smell” effect the boiling of water suggest the concrete thinking and elemental sensuousness of a child’s “intake” of the world. The line also presents a compelling sensory fact that goes to sight, hearing, and smell (and by extension, taste). The final poem of the collection, “Price Lake,” manages a similar effect, a return to a core instance in early life, one that could not be fully comprehended at the time of its occurrence, but that shifted the world on its axis none the less, and in a good way. Here, the speaker cast his remembrance of the event in the past tense. His is the voice of an adult mediating the child’s discovery of his parents’ love story, when he—the child— came upon them in a tender embrace on the banks of a pond: “in that moment I knew / I did not belong to them / . . . so slipped away unnoticed [.] . . . “He continues, “[The] gift of that summer took / years to unveil . . .”

Rash is wonderful when the speakers in his poems treat of the interactions of parents, grandparents, and siblings. I was especially taken with “Water Quilt” and “The Wallet.” In the first poem, a “truck bed blossomed with sleep’s cloth,” a quilt hand made by the speaker’s grandmother who insists on washing the garment in the Laurel Creek, since its waters are the only ones pure enough to rinse away the silt of work grime, worry, fever[.] She tells the child that the water becomes one with the cloth, and so he “slept deep beneath the whisper of water.” An interesting aspect of this vivid anecdote is the speaker’s father— the grandmother’s son—who helps in the washing: “both mother and son unfurling / what she had stitched together.” In “The Wallet,” the father is shown to be both terrified and terrifying when another son, the speaker’s brother, loses his balance in a stream and nearly drowns. The father “flail[s] downstream,” “tripping on stones,” to “collar” his son. He is also desperately searching the boy’s pants pockets for what might be the family’s last few dollars. The father does not comfort the terrified child and his sibling, for he too is in jeopardy:

For this is October. My father
believes he’ll be fired soon,
will face winter’s cold coming
without thirty-four washed-away dollars.

This poem deftly dramatizes the scene endangerment and undoing, both by means of the crisp verbs in the exposition of the accident scene and in the enjambment and repetition of lines that offer the speaker’s reaction to what has occurred:

my father not saying, don’t worry,

a life is precious, not saying

something like that, not tousling
my brother’s hair and smiling.

“The Wallet” gives evidence of Rash’s considerable narrative skill. Where I believe he is less convincing is in such poems as “The Code,” a set piece about a highland character, MacGregor. This short poem feels ready-made in its gothic romanticism. As an overly compressed narrative of personal tragedy, the poem does not clarify MacGregor’s state of knowledge at the close. Does he know that his only son’s blood stains the shirt of the mysterious stranger to whom he has offered both unquestioned hospitality and a means of escape? Does “the code” require the father to complete the grim task of washing the blood from the murderer’s clothing? How should the reader feel about MacGregor’s predicament?

Rash also gives way at times to a Faulknerian syntax that seems flat, as in “Genealogy”:

From Wales to Murderkill Hundred, then
in one generation down the Shenandoah,
to North Carolina where tombstones raised
a topography of accident and will
across three mountain counties, otherwise
crossing only centuries. . .

In the main, however, Waking is a delightful experience. And, I was thrilled to encounter words—wonderfully sonorous words—that I had to look up. Sculpen (or, sculpin), for example, are venomous bony fish having many spines and large pectoral fins. Bottom dwellers, most species of sculpen live in salt water, but some called muddlers thrive in fresh water lakes and streams. Scorpion fish, rock fish, flat heads and sea robins are some of the exotica of this family. As well, a seine is a kind of net, one used to surround a school of fish like a caul. Anglers will be very familiar with these and other references to fish and to fishing, but I was entering a new and gratifying world. I am always happy when poets enlarge my comprehensions by availing me of more words I can use to name objects and experiences.

Review of "Nor the Battle to the Strong" by Charles F. Price

This review was written by poet and historian Seabrook Wilkinon who has also participated in past Carolina Mountains Literary Festivals.

If this were a judicial matter (but when is criticism not?) I should have to recuse myself. The author is one of my closest friends, and I was involved in the creation and publication of this book almost from the beginning more than four years ago. I read and commented on the chapters as they were written, and at the far end of the long gestation process was among those who corrected the galley-proofs. I am quoted on the back cover, and thanked in the Afterword. Familiarity often breeds, if not contempt, a steady decrease in enthusiasm, but with each perusal of Nor the Battle to the Strong I have been more impressed with Charles Price’s singular achievement. In these lax days we throw out superlatives with abandon worthy of Congress flinging wide the pork -- no sausage biscuit is worth eating if it is not “famous” -- but this really is a masterpiece, a work that rises suddenly to tower above its contemporaries, just as it far surpasses Price’s previous award-winning novels.

For most of the centuries in which it has been written, history was assumed to be primarily a record of the mighty doings of the great, a chronicle of kings and battles. In the 20th century history began to tilt the balance towards the common man, or at least to make the attempt. Nor the Battle to the Strong looks at the Revolution in the South through both ends of the telescope, from two vastly different points of view, that of the general commanding American forces in the South, and that of a neophyte private, James Johnson, a Scots immigrant and absconded indentured servant who lived through the bloody events depicted in this novel to become one of the author’s maternal ancestors.
The amount of information available to Price in recreating these very different men was as sharply-contrasted as their careers. James Johnson lived until 1850, so his federal pension application was on file, providing an outline of his service in the final two years of the war. None of his correspondence survived, but Nathanael Greene’s does in astonishing quantity. The immense task of editing and publishing it, in 13 hefty volumes, took more than 30 years and was completed only in 2005. Price drew extensively on this rich source in shaping his portrait of Greene. One of the novel’s many felicities is the way the novelist weaves the words of Greene’s letters into his narrative. At the close of Part 10 the general is sitting up late in his marquee, writing what is perhaps his most famous letter, to his friend Col. Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut, endlessly quoted because it is supremely quotable, humorously acknowledging that “there are few Generals that has run oftener, or more lustily than I have done, But I have taken care not to run too farr; and commonly have run as fast forward as backward, to convince our Enemy that we were like a Crab, that could run either way.”
So immersed did Price become in Greene’s distinctive prose idiom that the last letter quoted in the book, that to his beloved wife Caty written just after the great battle at Eutaw Springs, is actually his work, not Greene’s -- and only the editors of the Greene papers could tell the difference. The contradictory nature of the crab well describes Greene’s mind as here portrayed, a brooding forest of paradoxes. For this reader the most moving part of a novel with many affecting scenes is the quiet struggle within the general as he approaches what he knows will be his last battle, his last chance to free South Carolina from British rule for good. Greene edits out all other elements of his nature, reserving only the one that can bring him the victory he has desperately craved for so long. The reader of Swift and Sterne given to philosophical musings must go. At the end of Part 22, “In Which General Greene Must Harden His Heart,” he realizes, “Now he must be, completely, the commander of men.”
In James Johnson Price finds, among much else, an ideal vehicle for presenting the reader with details of military life in the Revolution. He volunteers in complete ignorance of all involved, and as he learns the very complicated ropes, we learn along with him. Price’s command of the arcana of weaponry, transport and camp life is as magisterial as that of any historian. From his début he has been celebrated for his evocation of sensory effects, and sights, smells and sounds are brought vividly to life. We receive overwhelming evidence of just how smelly a business war was in the 18th century. In the chapter introducing him to us, General Greene is already getting a loathsome whiff of the inadequate sanitary arrangements at the Siege of Ninety-Six: “War-making was a noisome business, never more so than in summer in the Southern parts of America; and high smell was one of its many features from which his naturally delicate soul recoiled. He turned to Pendleton. ‘More vaults must be dug, farther out from camp.’” If only the enterprising Dr. Franklin had got round to inventing air-freshener, the course of the war might have been very different.
Speaking as one who is trying to write one, I find of all aspects involved in crafting a convincing novel creation of character is most important, and most mysterious. Anyone can create or crib a plot -- although very few can seamlessly intertwine two distinct strands, as Price does here. Many can describe, if few can evoke. Any storyteller can to some extent narrate action. But only true novelists can create characters who breathe -- and cough and tipple and retch -- on the page. This is as crowded as a Dickens novel with memorable characters, a high proportion of them likeable. Starting with only a name in a pension application, Price has crafted in James’ first officer a truly great comic character whose war is one long lost weekend:

“Captain Harris, as might have been expected, was more sympathetic. Of course he was also completely corned. ‘Were not the distinctions of rank and station so inflexible, my children, I should bid you join me in a cup of the creature,’ he greeted them, brandishing a silver chalice as they came into his tent and doffed their hats in salute.”

In Part 10, at his camp of repose in the High Hills of Santee, as he recruits his exhausted troops in preparation for the decisive battle for control of the whole South below Virginia, Greene is acutely aware that he is, as he ponders and plans and writes endless letters, becoming history. He discusses Thomas Sumter, who had given him greater difficulty than any other of his subordinate commanders, with Col. Otho Williams of Maryland:

“Sumter can afford his grudging and rebellious temperament, his chafing under orders; I must be forever moderate, reasonable, full of sober decision.”
“It’s why you’re great,” Williams observed, “and he’s small and petty. History will say so.”
“Will it indeed? I often wonder what history will say of us -- of me.”
“It’ll depend on who writes the history, won’t it?”
“It always has.”

In the final chapter we see that the real battle begins when the physical one is finished, the fight to prevail in the interpretation of what happened. To this end, the desperately weary Greene composes dispatches and letters to promote his slant on events. Back when he was discussing the Gamecock with Williams, Greene prophesied that in history “his portrait will be done in high color; mine but dimly.” For two centuries Nathanael Greene remained a shadowy figure; only in the past generation have we come to realize that he, not Washington, actually won the war, ensuring that the lower colonies would not remain part of the British empire. Now Charles Price has given us a portrait “done in high color,” fully worthy of this towering hero.
Nor the Battle to the Strong should enhance admiration for our ancestors who fought this terrible war from which all of our values as a people, all of our pretensions to greatness among nations ultimately derive. In my latest re-reading of this inexhaustible work, I experienced an epiphany while reading the long final paragraph of Part 22, in which Greene completes the self-editing that will make him the commander his battle needs. I realized I was reading not just a good book, not even a masterpiece, but a classic of our literature, as I am convinced this new novel will become. Yet it was written not by Hawthorne or Melville but by Charles Price from Burnsville, with whom I exchange e-mails about the day’s writing and the creeping of decrepitude, with whom I clink pints -- alas, too seldom. This novel does tower above the shrubs of mere scribblers like King’s Mountain rising abruptly and with complete authority from the rolling hills of the upper Piedmont -- and it too is the site of a great American victory.

Open Letter to Audrey Niffenegger

This letter was written by festival planner Britt Kaufmann in August of 2009 on her blog. Some spoilers included. Sorry.

I will not go see the movie The Time Traveler’s Wife. One look at the preview and I was too worried they’d get it wrong and all my imagined scenes would be erased, supplanted with a sub par version of your work. Besides, Eric Bana simply doesn’t look edgy enough to be Henry and if they soften him, they’ve missed the point.

It goes back to my childhood. My mother never let us watch the movie before we’d read the book . She never would let us watch The Little House on the Prairie because it wasn’t true enough to the original, despite all my wailing that it was a good show. Naturally this was maddening as a child, but she was right. After watching The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I only have one imagined scene left in my brain (of the Ents). All the others are filled with movie characters and scenes. I am also refusing to watchThe Chronicles of Narnia etc. and am not allowing my children to do so either, though I have read several of the books aloud to them.

I must tell you, though, of my experience reading The Time Traveler’s Wife. It was a book-club selection this spring and typically I don’t gravitate to love stories. OK. I actively avoid them. But this one I could handle. I guess it had enough sci-fi in it to pique my interest. Really, though, I loved it. So much of Henry and Clare’s life-long relationship rang true to my own relationship and marriage. I’ve known my husband since we were in the 4^th grade, went to the same high school, but didn’t start dating until we were in college. (We’ve now been married for 13 years.) The sense of knowing someone so long that you cease remembering life without that person… I could relate.

Aside from that, I grew up in Northern Indiana so visited Chicago frequently and even taught high school English in Southwestern Michigan.

The more I read, the more I avoided everything else to keep reading (including eating foods like sandwiches that don’t require you look elsewhere). Plus I was under deadline to get it done for book club. And then, the night before our discussion, I ran into a sentence that didn’t make any sense at all. I read it again. It still didn’t make any sense. I looked at the page numbers, as the sentence ran onto a second page… It skipped. My pages went from 354 to 323.Then they repeated up to 354 and jumped to 387.

I was utterly confounded and frustrated. I put the book down, emailed a close friend about borrowing her copy, but we couldn’t arrange a meeting until book club. I went to the library the next morning, but the book was checked out. I emailed another friend to check the library close to her… Nothing worked. So I did the only thing I could: I had a Henry Experience reading about Henry. (I wondered, however briefly, if this had been done intentionally…)

So, I began reading again at page 387, at which point Henry has already had a child I didn’t know they’d been successful in birthing and he has died. Or that’s how it seemed when I picked up the storyline. Then, a few days later, my accurate copy came from Amazon (after I complained) and I filled in the missing chunk of time and everything made sense. Just like Henry.

Of all the books to have such a pagination flaw! It was a reading experience I will never forget.

I have yet to make my own set of terrible wings, but I want to. I sketched out some initial plans and purchased blood red paper at DK Puttyroot the next week. I’ll use some black and maroon silk I have here at the house too. Though I’m thinking no bigger than a foot square of space. (You may have been to DK Puttyroot. It’s in my hometown of Burnsville, about 20 minutes from Penland School of Crafts. It’s one of my favorite places.)

Anyway, I had to share this odd experience with you. And if you ever feel up for a trip to the mountains some September, there’s a small literary festival we hold here each year. If you’re interested…

Happy writing & creating,

Britt Kaufmann

Review of "The Big Beautiful" by Pamela Duncan

The Big Beautiful by Pamela Duncan

Ok, I admit it. I’m a sucker for romance. You can have the chills and thrills, give me love and kisses. Pamela Duncan’s book, The Big Beautiful, has both, along with a plot that takes off running and characters you want to adopt for your own family.

At forty-five, Cassandra Moon thinks she’s been given a last chance at love and marriage with Dennis, but as she heads down the aisle, she realizes that something just isn’t right. She runs out of the church, jumps in the waiting limousine, cranks it up and burns rubber in front of the crowd gaping on the front steps.

When the limo runs out of gas Cassandra is rescued by a mysterious man in uniform who turns out to be closely acquainted with Cassandra’s Aunt May. Cassandra has fond memories of summers spent with May and Walton in Salter Path and, having no other plans, decides to spend the summer in May’s cottage.

Dennis reappears, having resolved to win her back, and he and the mysterious rescuer Hector set about competing for her attention. Along the way, Cassandra falls in love with Aunt May’s motley crew of salty friends, including twelve-year-old Annie Laurie, Hector’s motherless daughter. Cassandra also enjoys several unexpected and exciting adventures before coming to the ultimate and satisfying conclusion.

This exuberant tale is set against the backdrop of the North Carolina coast, a setting Pamela Duncan weaves into the narrative with a deft hand. There are quite a few moments of pure joy, such as this one:

“This must be how turtles felt, coming back into the water after laying their eggs, the

exhilaration of weightless freedom after being so heavy and burdened on land. Naked as the day she came into the world, nothing between her skin and the water, she became part of the big beautiful…”

Cassandra struggles with her self-worth, determined to find meaning in life and finds all that and more in some surprising places. The book is a fun and entertaining read with surprising depth. And who couldn’t use a nice vacation at the beach? I’ll take one, even if it lies between the covers of a book, especially if it’s a really good book.

This review was written by Beth Browne. Visit her blog at:http://bbwomenswrites.blogspot.com/

Review of "Mayhem in Mayberry" by Brian Lee Knopp

The immediacy of the cover brings the first of many adrenaline rushes. A ferocious looking dog-

mouth wide open exposes sharp teeth ready to chomp down hard while the title of the book written in white strikes from a manual type writer floats slightly distorted against black -hinting at the mystery of the multitude of grey areas that lie waiting in between black and white-areas about to be explored and exposed. Tension builds with the opening sentences of the Prologue. “Her pupils were blown black with stark fear and rage. She was tormented by voices in her head, by the micro-transmitters imbedded in her nose, by my intractable presence before her.”

Brian Lee Knopp, licensed P.I. in western North Carolina grabs you by the throat and takes you along for a wild and unpredictable ride. He describes the back roads “You are swallowed into the dark maw of overhanging trees and impenetrable rhododendron and laurel “hells,” softened up by the rutted crunching sections of gravel, and squeezed along the convoluted switchbacks drilled and blasted and looped along the nearly vertical walls of rock until you emerge…depleted…even after traveling one mile.” An apt metaphor for the warriors journey Knopp takes- an intimate and revealing examination of himself as well as the people he is investigating- managing to avoid the stereotyping often seen in descriptions of the Appalachian Mountains.

His love and admiration for the area and its people are evident even as he uses his extensive tracking skills as a woodsman and investigator to get the information he was hired to find. With an unflinching eye for detail and laugh out loud humor he shows us people and places most of us will never encounter- especially lying face down in mud with the very real chance of being shot at. Along the way we are given a front row seat as Knopp attempts to answer for himself that most puzzling and elusive of life’s questions. Who is Brian Lee Knopp anyway?

Brian Lee Knopp will read at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival on Saturday, September 10 and lead a special writing workshop for the alternative school.

Review written by Burnsville musician/writer/fitness instructor/hoola-hooper Joy Boothe.

Review of "Eggtown and Other Stories" by Zack Clark Allen

In his collection of op-eds and poems Eggtown and Other Stories, Zack Clark Allen gently reminds his readers of what ought not to be forgotten. He even writes of himself and his role within the family, “Looking back was a job that fell to me…” Look back he does.

Allen’s pieces, written when he was a thirtysomething, and the short introductions to them, written thirty years after that, are a remembrance wrapped in a reflection. He explores his own childhood, the stories of his grandparents, the mountains of Western North Carolina, Asheville, and its many citizens, both living and passed on, who he encountered in his years working at theAsheville Citizen-Times. Also, because he cannot help being an editor, he comments on his earlier writing style and gives contextual background for the many stories.

He freely admits what he writes is nostalgic, yet he deftly wields his clear images and poignant, everyday dialog so that he does not stray into the sentimental. The bad, along with the good, bear remembering and he includes both. Allen observes like a poet, seeing the connections, philosophies, symbols, and details in life—and plays with the best words to re-present them to his readers. Yet he pursues story like a newspaperman. Both qualities are evident in his writing: vivid brevity with a depth of emotion and meaning.

In the temporary newspaper world, much of what he had written might have become lost and forgotten but for this collection of his finest work. It puts one in the mind of Shakespeare’s words:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

By the time readers reach the final words of Allen’s last poem, they will be ready to take up his charge—or at least lend the book to a friend.

Now I pass it on to you;

Hold it, and its story

in trust for all of us.

I would also like to make a recommendation as to how to read Zack's book. I read it straight through so that I could write the review, but I don't know that I'd recommend this as a one-sitting read. Spread it out, reading a chapter or two at a time, so that you have the chance to absorb and reflect on the stories. Additionally, it might not hurt to have a box of tissues close for some of them.

This book was reviewed by Britt Kaufmann. Visit her blog at brittkaufmann.blogspot.com

Review of "Decrescendo" by Donna Jean Dreyer

Decrescendo a memoir by Donna Jean Dreyer

Donna Jean Dreyer’s memoir, Decrescendo, is a journey - several journeys, actually - evenly and gently braided together to lead the reader through the experience of an extraordinary partnership that spanned decades and continents, to its end upon the death of her husband, Bill Dreyer.

In relating their childhood backgrounds, their meant-to-be meeting at a Midwestern college, their dreams, plans, and struggles as a young family, their travels, and their work around the globe for the Friends Service Committee, and the eventual settling into her caregiver’s role as her dashingly theatrical husband’s health falters, Dreyer shares with her readers humor, passion, intimacy, and - literally - heartbreak.

Dreyer’s memoir time-hops, which strengthens the fabric of her story. From a less intuitive writer, funny and touching anecdotes dropped into a manuscript could make for a tedious read, but Decrescendo pulls one in, surprises, delights, and affects. It is as thoughtfully and lovingly crafted as the marriage whose tale it tells.

Donna Jean Dreyer will be reading from her memoir at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, September 9 and 10, 2010 in Burnsville. See www.cmlitfest.org for more authors and information. Visit the author's blog at http://djdreyer.blogspot.com/

Review written by Lucy Doll