A Good Read -- SOUTHERN STYLE

Thanks for stopping by this SquidLit lens. If you love classic southern fiction like I do, you will be interested in reading this novel.

Below you will find several reviews of the novel Down River by John Hart. Some of these reviews come from book review sites, professional magazines, or Book Review Blog. You will also find a synopsis of Down River.

What exactly is "southern fiction"? The heck if I know? I just know that it seems to exist as a sub-genre and I love it.

Let me see, can I create a description that suits me for "southern fiction"? Well, I will try.

I like to use metaphors. So here comes one for you to think about.

When I used to fly (on an airplane, of course) from Denver, Colorado to Birmingham, Alabama, I loved to watch the changing landscape below. I noticed that the terrain began brown and flat, then the closer we came to the southeast, the landscape became greener and had more rivers. Those rivers closer to Colorado tended to be gently curving and coursing thru a brown dust. Those southern rivers I saw curved a lot, kind of like ribbon candy on a piece of green moss.

From my seat high in the sky, the rivers in the south looked slow moving.

As I learned in geology at the University of Alabama, rivers have a life span. When a river is young it is fast moving. As it ages, it picks up lots of rocks, dirt and whatever. All that accumulated baggage makes the river slow down and when it slows down, it drops some of the stuff it has picked up on the journey and curves around it. The older rivers are slow, they curve, slow down and drop more stuff. That dropped silt is rich and makes for good crops.

That is what southern fiction is; a slow moving river. It has picked up oh so much over the years. It tells you about where it has been, then, moves on. What southern fiction drops along the way is rich and loamy. Out of it grows stories of family secrets and personal memories. Those stories are like no other-I do not know why.