Book Reviews

Blue Christmas Bones  By Carolyn Haines  Minotaur Books, 2024  Hardcover with dust jacket: $28.00  Genre: Fiction/Mystery & Detective/Cozy  Reviewed by Abby McGinn  Bestselling author Carolyn Haines offers a delightful novel full of Christmas and paranormal spirit in this recent addition to the Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery series.  Detective Sarah Booth Delaney, along with her agency partner Tinkie Bellchase Richmond and their friends Cece Dee Falcon and Millie Roberts, travel to Tupelo, Mississippi, for the annual Elvis Festival. The group of women [...]

Listen to the Land: Creating a Southern Woodland Garden  By Louise Agee Wrinkle  Design Books, 2024  Hardback: $40  Genre: Gardening, memoir  Reviewed by Jay Lamar  Garden books obsess me. Books on trees, hardy perennials, how to attract wildlife, planting in shade, planting in full sun, famous gardens of the British Isles, white gardens, and native plant gardens, to name a few, take up space on furniture and floors, at arms’ reach for a spark of inspiration or a moment’s meditation on [...]

Mobile and Havana: Sisters across the Gulf  By John S. Sledge and Alicia García-Santana; Photos by Chip Cooper and Julio Á. Larramendi  Ediciones Polymita S.A. of Guatemala City, 2024  Distributed by The University of Alabama Press  Hardcover: $49.95  Genre: History, Architecture, Photography  Reviewed by Edward Journey  Mobile and Havana: Sisters across the Gulf is immediately appealing with its expansive text, large format, and stunning photographs. On the first encounter, it might be a bit daunting to figure out just what is [...]

Letters to Little Rock   by Jennifer Horne  Kelsay Books, 2024  Paperback: $20  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Eleanor Boudreau      The loss of a loved one is devastating. As Tennyson laments, it is also “common to the human race /... Too common!” It is so common, in fact, that there is a poetic genre that deals with loss: elegy. Most basically, an elegy is a poem of mourning written on the occasion of a death. There is also a modern form [...]

As We Vanish from Public View  By Hank Lazer  7 Points Press, 2024  Paper: $18  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Ken Autrey  Hank Lazer, one of the most prolific Alabama writers, has published 35 volumes of poetry and several essay collections. His most recent book, As We Vanish from Public View, contains sixty untitled poems, each dated diary-like and sometimes appended by the location in which it was written. This documentation of time and place seems particularly apt for a collection such [...]

Backwaters  By Lee Rozelle  Montag Press, 2024  Paper: $17.95  Genre: Fiction; Horror; Science Fiction; Bizarro  Reviewed by Polly Schattel  Just when you thought all the brackish, muddy water could finally be wrung from the wet old raiments of the genre known as “southern gothic,” along comes Lee Rozelle’s interconnected series of short stories and a novelette called Backwaters: Twelve Murky Tales. Rozelle brings a freshness of vision and a unique, inventive approach to this disturbing mosaic of a lake town in [...]

How to Care for a Human Girl: A Novel   By Ashley Wurzbacher  Simon & Schuster  Hardcover: $28  Reviewed by Calliope (CJ) Walls   The novel How to Care for a Human Girl by Ashley Wurzbacher is a story of two sisters traveling similar paths after their mother's death. It delves into the stories of Jada and Maddy, sisters with a strained relationship. Each blames the other for their mother’s death, and both are fighting to survive a world turned upside down.   The [...]

The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras  By Sharony Green  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023  Cloth: $28.95  Genre: History, Literary History, Latin American and Caribbean Studies  Reviewed by Jason Gordy Walker  Zora Neale Hurston, known the world over for Their Eyes Were Watching God, struggled to maintain literary relevance after the Harlem Renaissance. Disappointed in her friend Langston Hughes—who had planned to additionally credit their typist for their collaborative play Mule Bone, against the wishes of Hurston, whose life [...]

This Southern Metropolis: Life in Antebellum Mobile  By Mike Bunn  NewSouth Books, an imprint of The University of Georgia Press, 2024  Hardcover: $119.95; Paperback: $27.95  Genre: History; Travel Writing  Reviewed by Edward Journey  Mike Bunn’s Fourteenth Colony: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South during America’s Revolutionary Era is one of the most colorful and intriguing histories I have read recently. Extensive research and primary sources bring a lesser-known colonial history to vibrant life. Now, author and historian Bunn – the [...]

Birding to Change the World  By Trish O’Kane  HarperCollins Publishers, 2024  Hardcover: $29.99  Genre: Nonfiction, Environmental  Reviewed by William Deutsch    Every Spring, I teach a Birding Basics course through the Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn University. I love watching septuagenarians become children in an Alabama park, with eyes wide open and mouths agape upon seeing a bird in full breeding plumage recently returned from the tropics. But that amazement is often followed by a quizzical look and pensive mood: Why [...]

Spooky America: The Ghostly Tales of Alabama  By Alan Brown  Arcadia Children’s Books/Arcadia Publishing, 2023  Paperback: $12.99  Genre: Juvenile Fiction, State & Local History, Folklore   Reviewed by Barbara Barcellona Smith    Children Beware and Read if You Dare – Once kids crack open the skeletal spine of Alan Brown’s Spooky America: The Ghostly Tales of Alabama, the journey through some of Alabama’s most historically haunted houses, universities, buildings, and bogs begins. All the “spidery-senses” awaken as readers travel through these stories [...]

Some Nightmares Are Real: The Haunting Truth Behind Alabama’s Supernatural Tales  By Kelly Kazek  Illustrated by Sarah Cotton  The University of Alabama Press, 2024  Hardcover: $22.95  Genre:  Young Adult, Folklore, Ghost Stories  Reviewed by Alan Brown     For generations, writers and filmmakers have labored under the premise that audiences love to be scared. In most of these cases, the reader or the viewer knows that the threat presented in the stories is not real. As Alabama folklore writer Kathryn Tucker Windham [...]

Pocket Full of Teeth   By Aimee Hardy   Running Wild Press, 2024   Paperback: $18.59   Genre: Fiction   Reviewed by Katharine Armbrester  It’s interesting, isn’t it, how stories sometimes can’t be separated from the land they’re on.  During the Covid-19 pandemic, Eddy Sparrow requests an unfinished manuscript. She wants to know why her late mother was not only writing about but investigating another mother and daughter, along with their mysterious old home in the remote Georgia mountains.  Then a body is found, and the [...]

Welcome to Sand Mountain  By David Hammond  Solstice Publishing, 2024  Paperback: $22.00  Genre: Science Fiction  Reviewed by Edward Journey    The first thing you should know is that Fyffe, Alabama, atop Sand Mountain, was the site of more than fifty possible UFO sightings over two days in February 1989. Pilgrims interested in “Unexplained Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs), the newest name for UFOs, still arrive in the town on the anniversaries in hopes of seeing something. This is the factual context for a [...]

Seven Shades of Evil: Stories from Matthew Corbett’s World  By Robert McCammon  Lividian Publications, 2023  Hardcover: $39.50; Paperback: $24.99; eBook: $11.49  Genre: Historical Fiction; Mystery/Thriller; Short Stories  Reviewed by Edward Journey    Legions of Robert McCammon fans have followed his “Matthew Corbett” historical suspense series for more than two decades. The tenth and final installment, Leviathan, is due out this fall. In the meantime, Seven Shades of Evil: Stories from Matthew Corbett’s World is a collection of eight stories featuring both [...]

D.O.A. at Dante’s  By Robert Collins  11thour Press, 2023  Paper:  $16.00  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Richard Hague  Robert Collins is co-founder of The Birmingham Poetry Review and author of several previous volumes of accomplished and varied poems. His latest collection, D.O.A. at Dante’s, is set in a college-town bar haunted by the lost souls of wasted adjuncts and professors, graduate students, hippies, slumming sorority girls, drop-outs, and various ne-er-do-wells and hangers-on of the kind Dante might have encountered in his Inferno, [...]

The Mistakes That Made Us: Confessions from Twenty Poets  By Irene Latham and Charles Waters  Illustrated by Mercè López  Carolrhoda Books/Lerner Publishing Group, 2024  Hardcover: $14.24  Genre: Poetry, Picture Books   Reviewed by Barbara Barcellona Smith  In this consequential compilation of mishaps and mistakes, children learn ownership of one’s errors, the value of an apology, and to make amends with others and with themselves. Irene Latham and Charles Waters’ well-rounded selection of award-winning authors works beautifully to create this heartfelt and meaningful [...]

Midnight Cry: A Shooting on Sand Mountain   By Lesa Carnes Shaul   NewSouth Books/University of Georgia Press, October 2024   Hardback: $27.95   Genre: Alabama History, True Crime  Reviewed by Richard Kent Evans   With Midnight Cry, Lesa Carnes Shaul unravels a fascinating moment in Alabama history in the guise of a fast-paced, true-crime thriller. On May 17, 1951, Aubrey Kilpatrick, a farmer and known bootlegger, got into a dispute with sharecroppers living on his property that threatened to turn violent. Marshall County Sheriff [...]

Southern Footprints: Exploring Gulf Coast Archaeology  By Gregory A. Waselkov and Philip J. Carr  The University of Alabama Press  August, 2024  400 Pages, 33 B&W figures, 149 color figures  Hardcover: $120.00; Paperback: $29.95; eBook: $29.95  Genre: Nonfiction, Archaeology  Reviewed by Ian W. Brown    A cornucopia filled with potpourri. Recently, I had the good fortune to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where I got to experience firsthand, in their place of origin, the works of the Old Masters. I have always been amazed [...]

The Unlikely Journey of Leland and Diane  By Edward M. George  Tnsb, 2024  Paperback: $23.95  Genre: Novel  Reviewed by Edward Journey    Literature is full of stories of the ouster of a fading privileged class by a rising working class. On a small and nonconfrontational scale, that is the main throughline of Edward M. George’s first novel, The Unlikely Journey of Leland and Diane, set in the last decade of the twentieth century in small but busy Libertytown in Creek County, [...]

All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights  By Adam Berlin  Livingston Press, 2024  Paperback: $19.95  Genre: Literary Fiction; Short Stories   Reviewed by Danny Gamble    With All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights, Tartt First Fiction Award recipient Adam Berlin’s collection of fifteen short stories introduces readers to well-developed characters subject to the foibles of day-to-day existence. Readers may recognize some of these characters. Others may recognize themselves.    Many of these characters dream of a career in Hollywood. Readers can [...]

The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade  By Hannah Durkin  Amistad, 2024  Paperback: $29.99  Genre: U.S. History; Race & Ethnic Relations  Reviewed by Edward Journey    The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade, by Hannah Durkin, provides sweeping and detailed new scholarship about the African diaspora, focusing on the people kidnapped and transported on the Clotilda. The notorious ship, now lying [...]

Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions  By Garrett Ashley  Press 53, 2024  Paperback: $17.95  Genre: Short Fiction  Reviewed by Edward Journey    As I was reading Garrett Ashley’s new collection of short stories, Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions, a woman asked what I was reading. I told her I was reading a book to review, and she asked me what it was about. I must have hesitated, and she said, “Well, just tell me about something you’ve read in it.” [...]

Southern Rivers: Restoring America’s Freshwater Biodiversity   By R. Scot Duncan   The University of Alabama Press, March 2024  Hardcover: $120.00; Paperback: $34.95; eBook: $34.95  Genre: Nonfiction, Environmental   Reviewed by Jim Plott     Biologist R. Scot Duncan remains amazed at the diverse aquatic life found in the rivers of Alabama and the Southeast. In fact, he says, the Southeast may harbor richer and more unique aquatic species than any other place on the Earth. Yet, in his latest book, Southern Rivers: Restoring [...]