Moonshine to Moonbloom: Becoming Aradella Stark
Ebook
Aradella Stark came into a world beautifully rooted in nature but limited in cultural development. How she transcends that limitation is the overarching theme of the book, set during the mid-1900s in a cotton mill village located in Northwest Georgia where her mother is a nightshift spinner at the mill and her father a house painter who makes most of his income from bootlegging moonshine whiskey. Nurtured by her angelic uncle, often referred to as "peculiar," she learns to love nature and experiences racial harmony with nearby neighbors. This story of Aradella Stark's coming of age is surrounded and supported by story chapters that enrich the sense of her emerging from a strongly imagized particular place and community and family. Her own intelligence and compassion, discerned and brought into bloom by a church pastor who links her to work and college in Atlanta, make possible her eventual doctoral education and her return to reclaim her roots. Despite the absence of cultural advantages known to city dwellers, what was not absent from her youth were the alternating tragic and comic motifs found in the best Southern fiction tradition, designed to bring to the reader deep engagement and moments of great delight.
“Barbara Knott has long since proved herself to be an exceptional poet, and now with her novel, Moonshine to Moonbloom: Becoming Aradella Stark, it becomes clear that she’s also a born storyteller. A page-turner in the best sense of the word, this book is destined to become a Southern classic, and one that her readers will devour, as did I, with great pleasure.”
—Rosemary Daniell, author of Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex, and Suicide in the Deep South
“Barbara Knott’s Moonshine to Moonbloom: Becoming Aradella Stark carries the reader through a generations-long saga of a family surviving the gritty times of the early American South. You may not want to relive the old days after you read Knott’s novel, but you’ll certainly give the men and women high praise for going through them. And you’ll be glad for Knott’s exceptional storytelling that makes it so real.”
—Estelle Ford-Williamson, author of Abbeville Farewell: A Novel of Early Atlanta and North Georgia
“This story, told with warmth and empathy, is filled with drama, romance, sadness, embarrassment, laughter, and love, and the storytelling is so good it pulled me right into making the journey with Aradella.”
—Nancy Rose Law, writer, The Grapevine Art and Soul Salon
- Title: Moonshine to Moonbloom: Becoming Aradella Stark
- Author: Barbara Knott
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9798385208142, 9798385208135, 9798385208128
- Resource ID: LLS:9798385208142
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-01-02T21:43:30Z
Barbara Knott is an award-winning poet with three collections, including In Every Carnation: The Body of God. One of her poems, “Boxwood,” was selected as first prize winner of a national competition by poet Nikki Giovanni, judging for New Millennium Writings. Her writing career includes twenty years of hosting and publishing an online literary/art journal, The Grapevine Art and Soul Salon, at www.barbaraknott.net.