Book Reviews

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 the 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 [...]

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 [...]

A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road   By Pete Candler   University of South Carolina Press, 2024   Paperback: $27.99   Genre: Memoir, Southern History, Travelogue   Reviewed by Edward Journey     In her foreword to Pete Candler’s A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road, Rosanne Cash writes that she has “learned that to come into the fullness of our own potential, we must know our own history.” Candler begins the book with an [...]

The Heiress  By Rachel Hawkins  St. Martin’s Press, 2023  Fiction, thriller  Reviewed by Lenore Vickrey  I was first introduced to Rachel Hawkins when I read The Wife Upstairs a few years ago. I was intrigued by the fact that the author was an Alabamian, and the book was set in Birmingham, where I grew up. I always like to support the home-grown talent in our state, and I wasn’t disappointed. So, when presented with another Hawkins book, The Heiress, I was [...]

Butterfly Nebula  By Laura Reece Hogan  The Backwaters Press, 2023  Paperback: $17.95  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Jennifer Horne  A glimpse into my internet search history while reading this book gives a good indication of its subject matter: firework jellyfish, vampire squid, question mark butterfly, Be star, camel eye of needle, Elysia sea slug, via negativa, Daphne mythology, tiger shark, Microscopium constellation, Hydra constellation, Crux constellation, Telescopium constellation, Phoenix constellation, Siphonophores, praya dubia, manatee nebula, lyrebird, blue hour. Suffice it to say [...]

Trees of Alabama  By Lisa J. Samuelson  The University of Alabama Press, 2020  Paperback: $34.95; eBook: $34.95  Genre: Nonfiction, Educational  Reviewed by Jim Plott  Auburn University forestry professor Lisa Samuelson might have unintentionally stirred up a controversy with her latest book, Trees of Alabama. Should you use it as a field guide to help identify trees in the woods, or do you keep it at home as a library reference book? Certainly, the cover and pages are thick enough to withstand [...]

Bigger: A Literary Life  By Trudier Harris  Yale University Press, 2024  Paperback  Nonfiction  Reviewed by Charlotte C. Teague  After more than eighty years, Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) is still relevant to the life that we live, and in her newest book, renowned scholar Trudier Harris shows readers why. Harris crafts an exceptional biography of Wright's fictional character, Bigger Thomas, who readers typically either hate, pity, or misunderstand. Rarely has he been understood, according to Harris; however, she urges readers to [...]

Through Old Ground  By Randy Cross  Bluewater Publications, 2024  Paperback; $24.95  Genre: Memoir  Reviewed by Lisa Harrison  In the tradition of Lewis Grizzard and Rick Bragg comes community college English professor Randy Cross, whose collection of essays Through Old Ground holds its own with the best. This memoir takes readers down a lane of reminiscences beginning in Cross’s sleepy, small hometown of St. Joseph, Tennessee, and winding through foreign locales of Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. Along the way, Cross recounts [...]