A good read on a little known period

books:

	• The Fall Line Errol Burland Dorrance Publishing Co. Inc., 2006 - 512 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Right Book at the Right Time

The Fall Line is all about Jamestown before the Revolution. What could be more interesting than a book about the life and government under British rule just as the Queen of England visits to celebrate. While the romantic part is fiction, and certain characters are fiction, the story of Bacon's Rebellion is pure fact, as are the other historical events. It is not only a great read, but a piece of history that jumps off the page. All teachers of American history will love this book along with the rest of us.

Convincing blend of fact and fiction

An intriguing love triangle, fierce struggles between native peoples and British settlers, complex maneuvering of political forces among colonists of the Virginia Coast in the late seventeenth century, with a background of wonderfully described waterways and lush countryside -- all these elements are revealed in "The Fall Line " -- a convincingly detailed historical novel which turned out to be a genuinely "good read" for me.

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The Fall Line

With a keen eye for historical detail, Errol Burland has written the moving tale of a turning point in American history that might have been. By centering the story on Lyn Bacon, Burland shows the human cost war and rebellion exacts from men and women swept up by forces beyond their control, which alternately offer great promise, then great devastation. With a diverse cast of memorable characters and a strong sense of the look and feel of Virginia, this work should appeal to readers attracted to Virginia's colonial history, or just intrigued by the thought of what it might have been like to strike out on one's own in the strange new world America presented to its European colonists.

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A good read on a little known period

The Fall Line is a historical novel of colonial Virginia, set in a time of which most Americans are astoundingly ignorant, since popular histories tend to leap 150 years from Pocahontas to Patrick Henry with lightning ease. Errol Burland brings this tierra incognita to life through the eyes of a heroine of singular courage and social skill. Lyn Duke leaves an England torn by religious factionalism and family strife only to find that she and her passionate but impulsive husband must cope with Native Americans on the frontier and the intrigues of Bacon's Rebellion in the colonial capital. To do so will require skill, imagination, and the daring to be an independent woman in a world dominated by ambitious men.
The writing in this book is remarkably mature for a first novel. Scenes are set with evocative visual imagery which brings the author's extensive historical research to life in a way that is never heavy or pedantic. After its perilous early years, the Virginia colony prospered rapidly from export of tobacco to an England only to eager to light up. It promises Lyn and her husband the means of recouping the fortunes which he has squandered. Burland moves her characters through this ever shifting landscape with a sure hand. It is only to be hoped that she will return to this exciting period in later work

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Outstanding historical fiction

This is a marvelous tale of Jamestown set in the mid 1600's. The characters are appealing, the history is fascinating and the story is captivating. The writing is wonderful and the narrative puts the reader right into the time period. It illustrates the challenges facing the settlers, their struggle with Indians and their effort to change the government for the better. This is a timely book for the 400th anniversary of the settling of Jamestown. This story would lend itself to a movie just as Gone With The Wind did for the Civil War.

reviews: page 1, 2

In 1674 circumstances drive Lyn Duke, Nat Bacon, and John Grey from the protective environment of their native Suffolk to the challenges of strife-ridden colonial Virginia. The three expect to find succor in the Tidewater, the area within the fall line of Virginia's rivers, which is deemed safe. It is here that former generations of colonists have wrested the land from the Indians and replicated the gentility of life in upper-class England. But fate determines that Lyn, Nat, and John will not find the peace they seek. No sooner have they settled on their frontier plantation when a third Indian war plunges them into conflict, first with the Indians themselves, and then with the autocratic Governor Sir William Berkeley, and his Green Spring supporters. As blow after blow falls on the emigrants, Lyn loses the man she has loved since childhood and the cherished plantation where her child was born. Life both within and beyond the fall line defeats her, and it is not until she returns to Suffolk that she finds both the love and the peace she craves.

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