Saturday Review: “Story of a Place” a review by Evan Peter Smith of Bland Simpson’s Clover Gardens: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir (2024) in NCLR Online Spring 2026
“His new book, Clover Garden, which Simpson bills as a memoir, is really a biography of a place – the titular Clover Garden, a historic, rural community in southwest Orange County, NC, where Simpson has resided since the 1970s,” Smith explains in his review. And this is true: anyone who has spent significant time out in that neck of the woods will immediately recognize not only road names and old buildings, but those landmarks that are no longer there, that we all still use in directions on how to get somewhere.
But Simpson is not an NC Literary Hall of Fame member for nothing. Smith reminds the reader, “If you have ever sat on a porch and listened to a local historian tell tales of the place he loves, you know to expect a certain amount of backtracking, meandering, and side stories to unfold. But when the teller of the tales is this good, when the voice is this rich, you can sit on that porch for hours, knowing that when night falls, you’ll be in for a beautiful account of the starlight.”
““To be a citizen of Clover Garden here in the Old Fields, to be a part of its membership, has been and remains a great wonder in my life,” Simpson writes in the book’s opening pages, “and what follows are stories from within that wonder” (5). True to his word, that’s exactly what this book is: stories of unique people, strange incidents, unfortunate traumas, lost loves, broken lives, and hilarious encounters.”
Read Smith’s entire review here. Get your own copy of the book from the publisher or your local independent bookstore!
