Book Reviews

The Storm By Rachel Hawkins St. Martin’s Press, 2026 Hardcover: $29.00 Genre: Thriller Reviewed by Dr. Candice N. Hale   After enjoying flawed characters, surprising twists, and dark suspense in The Woman Upstairs, The Villa, and The Heiress, I expect Rachel Hawkins’ newest thriller, The Storm, to bring the same excitement. Although The Storm at first seems quieter and more restrained, I soon saw that Hawkins is not trying to shock us right away; instead, she slowly builds tension between the [...]

Lullaby for the Grieving  Ashley M. Jones  Hub City Press, 2025  Paper: $16.95  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Taylor Byas    What is the purpose of the lullaby? By definition, a lullaby is a song meant to send someone to sleep—within the word, the verb “lull” also hints at its function. Ashley M. Jones’ Lullaby for the Grieving is itself a song that seeks to soothe us as the many-faced monster of grief waits under our beds.  Jones wastes no time getting to the point. The book opens with the [...]

Box Turtles, Hooligans, and Love, Sweet Love  By Mary Dansak  Little Green Notebook, 2025  Paper:  $19.99 Reviewed by Cindy Ragland  It seems as if we live in a time where everyone is nature journaling. Often, these are observations – looking at something from a stationary, protected point of view. Like looking out the kitchen window. Most people claim to love nature; they just do not want to get any of it on them. Not the case with Mary Dansak. She immerses herself in the natural environment. From letting a baby opossum sleep in her hair [...]

Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age  Joy Harjo   W.W. Norton, 2025  Hardcover: $21.99  Genre: Memoir     For A Girl Becoming   Joy Harjo with illustrations by Adriana Garcia   Norton Young Editions, 2025  Hardcover: $18.99  Genre: Children’s poetry     Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief   Joy Harjo with illustrations by Dana Tiger   Ten Speed Press, 2025  Hardcover: $17.99  Genre: Poetry     Reviewed by Pam Kingsbury   Joy Harjo, who was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in March, added three book projects [...]

The Road to Tender Hearts   By Annie Hartnett  Ballantine Books, 2025  Hardcover: $29.00  Genre: Fiction  Reviewed by Edward Journey  Annie Hartnett’s third novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is a heartfelt tale of family dynamics and dysfunction. Whether intentional or not, the book’s jacket illustration brings to mind the 2006 movie, Little Miss Sunshine; the comparison is apt since both that film and this book explore the discoveries and travails of a family road trip. Hartnett’s story is generously woven, chronicling heartbreak and hilarity.   PJ Halliday, the 63-year-old winner of a $1.5 million lottery a decade ago, lives in the small Massachusetts town of Pondville, just down the road from his ex-wife Ivy and [...]

Southern Bred   By Charles Ghigna  Central Avenue Poetry, 2025  Cloth: $19.00  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Foster Dickson  For those who are accustomed to associating Charles Ghighna’s name with Father Goose . . . this isn’t that. Ghigna is an accomplished poet whose publications range from The Father Goose Treasury of Poems for Children to inclusion in Harper’s and The New Yorker. His newest collection, Southern Bred, is a slim volume of mostly short poems – definitely for adults – that haunt the imagination with what is left unspoken. The text on the back cover describes them as “gothic poems” [...]

Little Ones   By Grey Wolfe LaJoie  Hub City Press; 2024  Paperback: $17.95  Genre: Short Stories  Reviewed by Edward Journey  Scattered here and there are folk art installations that defy description but create a lasting impact with surprises around every corner. Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Summerville, Georgia, comes immediately to mind. Butch Anthony’s Museum of Wonder Drive-Thru in Seale, Alabama, is another. Joe Minter’s African Village in Birmingham. Sam Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Brother Joseph Zoettl’s Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama. Reading Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s short story collection Little [...]

Troubled Waters  By Mary Annaïse Heglar    Harper Muse, 2024    Paperback: $17.99    Genre: Historical Fiction / Climate Justice / Contemporary    Reviewed by Dr. Candice N. Hale  Mary Annaïse Heglar’s Troubled Waters is a compelling debut that merges historical fiction with a contemporary resonance on the urgency of climate justice, the power of Black liberation and defiance, and the intergenerational trauma of family. Set in Mississippi and New Orleans, with flashbacks to 1950s Nashville, the novel follows Corrine Sterling, a college student and climate activist, and her grandmother Cora, a retired teacher [...]

Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales  By Hannah V. Warren  Sundress Publications, 2024   Paper: 16.00  Genre:  poetry, speculative fiction  Reviewed by Laura Secord    Hannah V. Warren’s Slaughterhouse for Old Wives' Tales, winner of the 2024 Whirling Prize, is speculative poetry at its richest. Spanning millennia, Warren's book uses lyricism, research, and imagination to create a brave, beautiful, and disturbing connection through time.    In her “note to the reader,” Warren asks us, “What do you invent when your bulbous flesh melts deep into swamp water?” Then she takes us on a journey through time, evolution, extinction, and transformation. Sci-fi and paleontology fans will latch onto this book in identification.    Voiced by an elementary-aged girl [...]

Junie  By Erin Crosby Eckstine  Ballantine Books, 2025   Hardcover: $30.00    Genre: Historical Fiction /Coming of Age/Magical Realism   Reviewed by Dr. Candice N. Hale  As William Faulkner reminds us, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” His enduring truth reverberates throughout Erin Crosby Eckstine’s powerful debut novel, Junie, urging readers to open themselves up to both unlearning and understanding. From Eckstine’s compelling storytelling, we learn how sixteen-year-old Junie navigates trauma, grief, and loss during her enslavement  in pre-Civil War Alabama. Let me be clear, Junie is more than a [...]

Everybody Wants to Rule the World   By Ace Atkins  William Morrow Large Print, 2025  Hardcover: $27.95  Genre: Crime, Thriller, Suspense  Reviewed by Lesa Carnes Shaul   When I interviewed Ace Atkins for First Draft in August of this year, he reflected on what it means to be a Southern writer in the twenty-first century:  I think the thing about being a Southern writer is that we’re always steeped in this idea that when you write about the South, it has to be the South of Flannery O’Connor and [...]

Unmasking Authentic Black Female Identity: The Power of Self-Defining and Shattering Stereotypes  By Idrissa N. Snider   Lexington Books, 2024  Hardback: $100  Genre: Nonfiction  ISBN: 978-1-66695-348-0  Reviewed by Charlotte C. Teague    In her new book, Unmasking Authentic Black Female Identity: The Power of Self-Defining and Shattering Stereotypes, womanist scholar Idrissa Snider offers a poignant perspective on harmful, negative, and controversial stereotypes that persist about Black women in American culture. Snider argues that through dynamic self-definition, Black women can triumph over external forces and reclaim their authentic selves.   Using Sojourner Truth as a symbol of strong Black women’s pursuit of survival, Snider shares a personal reflection and then elaborates on how Black women must [...]

The Book of Outcasts  By Matt Nagin  Strange Rebel Press, 2024  Paper: $14.99  Genre: Fiction  Reviewed by Nelson Sims  Matt Nagin’s The Book of Outcasts is a strange little collection of strange little stories. It’s bleak. It’s bone-dry. But it’s weirdly and sneakily absurd. These are stories about men on the outskirts of society, but not in the cool, misunderstood genius kind of way. No, these are the quietly unraveling types – men who drift through life like discarded receipts, wrinkled and unread. They are not, as one reviewer suggested, “behaving badly” so much as they are existing badly. And Nagin, to his credit, [...]

A Field Guide to North American Trees  by Garrett Ashley  Good Printed Things & Loblolly Press, 2025  Paper: $14.00  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Jason Gordy Walker  Alabama’s forests, and the many individual trees that constitute them—pine, oak, hickory, cottonwood, magnolia, birch, sycamore, and on and on—offer a colorful splendor stretching over 70 percent of the state. We ought to revere such a plethora of wooden beings, if not for their upright personalities than for their gift of sweet oxygen, a resource [...]

If I Could Choose a Best Day: Poems of Possibility   By Charles Waters and Irene Latham, Illustrated by Olivia Sua  Candlewick, 2025  Hardcover: $19.99  Genre: Poetry, Children’s Books  Reviewed by Barbara Barcellona Smith    Irene Latham and Charles Waters are back with another inspiring anthology of children’s poetry with If I Could Choose a Best Day: Poems of Possibility. No ifs, ands, or buts about it, this imaginative collection of thirty-one galvanizing poems motivates children to “imagine the possibilities the gift [...]

Every Speck: The Mythology of a Southern Poet, A Memoir in Poetry and Prose  By Bonnie Roberts   Archway Publishing, 2025   Paper $30.99, E-Book $3.99   Mixed Genre: Memoir, Poetry   Reviewed by Harry Moore  Henry James advised young writers, “Be one on whom nothing is lost.” Distinguished poet, teacher, publisher, and mentor Bonnie Roberts is not young—in her seventies—but her memoir Every Speck: The Mythology of a Southern Poet models a life of sustained attention and deep memory. In a kind of [...]

The Old Breed… The Complete Story Revealed  By W. Henry Sledge  Knox Press; 2025  Hardcover: $35.00  Genre: World War II History, Memoir  Reviewed by Edward Journey    Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981) has been called “one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war” and has been compared to The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front. Sledge, a Mobile native, worked on the book as a young professor at [...]

My Perfect Husband  By Georgina Cross   Bookouture, 2025   Trade paper: $10.99  Genre: Psychological thriller  Reviewed by Lisa Harrison     With her newest release, My Perfect Husband, Georgina Cross cements her place as a must-read emerging new author of psychological thrillers. With the tag line “My sister is dead. Did I marry her killer?” Cross crafts a mesmerizing literary bolero, gradually increasing the pace, details, and clues. The mystery begins amid the quotidian details of a happily married couple’s charming life in [...]

Secret Histories: A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship Edited by Kathleen Diffley, Caroline Gebhard, and Cheryl Torsney University of Georgia Press, 2025 Paper: $29.95 Genre: Essays Reviewed by Katharine Armbrester Secret Histories: A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship is a much-needed collection of critical essays about the overlooked Victorian writer and contains a fascinating essay by Alabama’s own Dr. Caroline Gebhard. If you are accustomed to reading literary nonfiction or biographies, “woman in the shadow of a [...]

Chase Harlem   By Elise Burke Brown   Rising Action, 2025  Trade Paperback: $17.99  Genre: Mystery & Detective   Reviewed by Tom Spencer   Joanna Harlem is a private investigator in New Orleans, although she tells us, “my friends call me Chase” and “my clients [...] call me P.I. Harlem.” This strikes me as a bit weird. I’ve read a lot of mysteries, but I’ve never read one where “P.I.” is used as an honorific before – though her client gamely employs it throughout, saying [...]

An Apprehension of Splendor: A Biography in Photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Family   By Shawn Sudia-Skehan  University of Alabama Press, 2025  Hardcover, $49.95  Genre:   Arts & Photography  Photo Essays  Reviewed by Alaina M. Doten, Ph.D.    An Apprehension of Splendor: A Biography in Photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Family, by Shawn Sudia-Skehan, is a new visual journey into the lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda, and their daughter, Scottie. Published in 2025 by the University [...]

Bones at the Crossroads  By LaDarrion Williams  Penguin Random House, 2025  Hardback: $20.99  Genre: Contemporary Fantasy / Young Adult  Reviewed by Dr. Candice N. Hale  In Bones at the Crossroads, the rousing sequel to Blood at the Root, LaDarrion Williams brings readers back to Caiman University for a story wielding  more secrets and betrayals than Malik Barron can handle. Although Malik is continuing his studies as a budding Black conjurer at his HBCU, he cannot release the abandonment, hurt, and trauma [...]

Smaller Versions  By Katherine D. Perry   Bottlecap Press, 2024  Chapbook: $10.00  Reviewed by H. M. Cotton  Katherine D. Perry, who previously published Long Alabama Summer in 2017, returns with a power-packed chapbook, Smaller Versions, from Bottlecap Press. In 16 poems, she leads readers through a variety of voices that speak of hardships, from hurricanes and COVID-19 to girlhood in the South. The running line through each encapsulation is persistence—a way to make it through when times get tough, as in “On [...]

A Wallflower’s Guide to Viscounts and Vice  By Manda Collins   Forever, 2025  Trade Paperback: $17.99  Genre: Historical Romance, Mystery   Reviewed by Lisa Harrison  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a peer in want of a great fortune must be in need of a wealthy bride. Thus, in 1874, William, Viscount Gilford, finds himself in a bit of a pickle. The steward of the estate Gilford recently inherited has absconded with the bulk of the money, and William’s man of business [...]