Western NC Reads …

It’s too late to vote now, and good thing, because it would have been a tough choice. Readers in western North Carolina had to select between these titles for the 2006 “Together We Read” program: Anthology of Regional Folk Tales, Sharyn McCrumb’s The Ballad of Frankie Silver, Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies, Gail Godwin’s A Mother and Two Daughters, and Ron Rash’s Saints at the River.

And the winner is . . . Saints at the River, Ron Rash’s 2004 novel, set in western South Carolina, about the death of a young girl and the environmental concerns that grip a small town.