Joe Samuel Starnes’s new novel Fall Line rang in the new year with an honor from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper included Fall Line among their “best books of the South” list for 2012.
Fall Line, based on a true story, follows the residents of a rural Georgia town as they deal with the flooding of their town by a man-made government dam.
“[In Fall Line], Starnes rips the lid off dirty Georgia politics, skewers the haves and honors the have-nothings who pushed back when a manmade lake came along to drown their communities for electricity and big profits,” writes Gina Webb for the Journal-Constitution. “Nothing says Southern like a bunch of corrupt good ol’ boys sitting around a table gambling away the lives of poor people.”
The October 2012 volume of Studies in American Culture also reviewed Fall Line. Jean Cash of James Madison University praised Fall Line as “a novel worthy of attention, providing real insight into how the power of money and government contributed to the loss of the agrarian South. … Starnes knows his home are and its people and how write about them with admirable authority and poetic understanding.”
In the article “Southern books offer varying points of view,” Todd South of the Chattanooga Times Free Press recommended Fall Line as well, writing that “the cast of characters are rich with color both in word and deed [and] he prose reads smooth and clean but still serves up layers of texture in scene and style.”
Fall Line is available in hardcover and ebook from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.