Book Reviews

Persephone’s Escalator  By Joe Taylor  Sley House Publishing, 2024  Paper: $16.99  Genre: Fiction, Supernatural  Reviewed by Nelson Sims  It’s not every day you pick up a novel that reads like American Horror Story: Coven sharing an elaborate feast with Stephen King, while dinner guests like Thomas Mann and James Joyce linger in the background. Joe Taylor’s Persephone’s Escalator is just that: a wild, hilariously unsettling ride into the supernatural, the existential, and the downright weird.  Taylor, a seasoned novelist with no [...]

What We Are Becoming: 2024 Southern Prize & State Fellowships for Literary Arts  By Various Authors; Introduction by John T. Edge  South Arts, Hub City Press; 2024  Softcover: $17.95  Genre: Short Fiction  Reviewed by Edward Journey    It is good news that South Arts, which has been supporting Southern arts in some form or another for almost half a century (it was previously Southern Arts Federation), now has a literary arts component under its far-reaching umbrella. It has kicked that new [...]

What Good Is Heaven  by Raye Hendrix  Texas Review Press, 2024  Paper: $21.95  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Jason Gordy Walker  Born in Birmingham and raised in Pinson, Alabama, Raye Hendrix, a poet and disability scholar, has penned a debut collection chock-full of Southern poems that buck against societal, familial, religious, and gender norms. Hendrix’s previous work includes two chapbooks—Every Journal is a Plague Journal and Fire Sermons, both published in 2021—plus short stories and nonfiction pieces online. Selected for The TRP [...]

Don’t Let the Devil Ride  By Ace Atkins  William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins; 2024  Hardcover: $30.00; Paperback: $18.99; eBook: $12.99  Genre: Crime Fiction  Reviewed by Edward Journey  If an international heist is planned and local thieves, headed up by an aging former drag queen named Miss Ricky, beat the foreigners to the loot by a couple of hours, the local denizens of Ace Atkins’s latest novel, Don’t Let the Devil Ride, might sum it up in one word: “Memphis.” [...]

Werewolf Hamlet  By Kerry Madden-Lunsford   Charlesbridge Moves, 2025  Hardcover: $18.99  Genre: Children’s Middle Grade Books,   Review by Emma C. Fox  Angus Gettlefinger has a problem—his big brother Liam might be a werewolf. What other explanation could there be for Liam’s increasing scruffiness, meanness, and sneaky nocturnal escapes from their Los Angeles home?  But Angus also has a brilliant plan. He and Liam share something in common: a passion for Golden Age Hollywood films and Shakespearean insults. And Angus’s fifth-grade “legacy project” [...]

Stinger  By Robert McCammon   Open Road Integrated Media, Inc., 2024  Paperback: $21.99  Genre: Science Fiction   Reviewed by Julian Jones  Last year’s Peacock original series, Teacup, became a must-watch for sci-fi horror fans. However, the inspiration behind the hit series is a masterpiece of science-fiction and horror that is engrossing and captivating. Written by New York Times Bestselling Author and Birmingham native Robert McCammon, Stinger is a third-person science-fiction thriller with the timeless theme of how extraterrestrial contact forces humans to overcome [...]

Leviathan: A Matthew Corbett Novel  By Robert McCammon  Lividian Publications, 2024  Hardcover: $39.95; eBook: $17.99  Genre: Historical Fiction, Horror, Suspense Thriller  Reviewed by Edward Journey  Leviathan, the tenth and final volume of Robert McCammon’s Matthew Corbett series, was recently released to much anticipation. The ebb and flow of Robert McCammon’s macabre and fascinating fiction is hard to resist. In the saga of Matthew Corbett novels and a volume of short fiction, McCammon follows the clever and charismatic “problem solver” Corbett, “the [...]

Long After We Are Gone  By Terah Shelton Harris  Sourcebooks, 2024  Paperback  Genre: Fiction  Reviewed by Charlotte C. Teague    The word “family” denotes strength, love, hope, memories, and often misunderstandings and pain. In Long After We Are Gone, author Terah Shelton Harris expounds on the meaning of this common word by sharing a story of four siblings struggling to battle their own personal demons against the backdrop of their father’s last words, “Don’t let the white man take the house.”   [...]

Once Upon a Magic City  By Salaam Green, Inaugural Poet Laureate, City of Birmingham  Cover Art by Micah Althea  An Initiative of the Poet Laureate of Birmingham, 2024  Paper and PDF: No Charge  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Michelle Dacus  As someone who has lived in nine of these United States, in well over a dozen cities—four in Alabama alone—I can attest that home is far more than the place we’re born or have roots in. A lot depends on what we [...]

The Carver and the Queen   By Emma C. Fox  Owl’s Nest Publishers, 2023  Hardcover: $20.99  Paperback: $12.99  Genre: Historical Fantasy, Young Adult  Reviewed by Lynn Lamere  Emma C. Fox’s The Carver and the Queen is reminiscent of a classic medieval fairy tale yet amplified with plot twists and intriguing characters.   Right away, fifteen-year-old orphan Petr finds himself facing a public whipping in a new village for losing three of the master’s cows while shepherding the herd. However, Petr is an exceptional boy, [...]

The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter: Essays on the President’s Books  Edited by Mark I. West and Frye Gaillard  Rowman and Littlefield, 2024  Hardback: $120.00; eBook: $50.00  Genre: Essays, History, Literary Criticism  Reviewed by Edward Journey  During the recent state funeral for President Jimmy Carter, his White House domestic policy advisor, Stu Eisenstat, declared his intention to “lay to rest the myth that his greatest achievements came only as a former president.” As we ponder the impressive and lasting accomplishments Carter [...]

The Life of Herod the Great  By Zora Neale Hurston and Introduction by Deborah G. Plant  Amistad, 2025  Hardback: $28.99  Genre: African American Fiction, Historical Fiction  Reviewed by Sharony Green  Zora Neale Hurston, the African American anthropologist-folklorist-novelist best known for being a core member of the Harlem Renaissance, was fixated on one thing in her final years: writing a book about Herod the Great. The general public, at last, has a chance to read her novel about this Biblical character. Scholar [...]

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 [...]