Book Reviews

Another Land of My Body  By Rodney Terich Leonard   Four Way Books, 2024  Paperback: $17.95  Genre: Poetry, Black and African American Poetry,  LGBTQ+ Poetry  Reviewed by Jason McCall     To live in Alabama is to live with death as a next-door neighbor. Among the states, only West Virginia and Mississippi rank below Alabama in life expectancy, and only Arkansas and Mississippi have higher infant mortality rates. The statistics for Alabama relating to standards like poverty and healthcare are similarly bleak. These [...]

The Education of Asa Paxton  By Gary S. Minder  RubyeGay Publishing, 2025  Paperback: $14.95  Genre: Historical Fiction, Young Adult Fiction   Reviewed by Carrie Dalby  “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is good advice to remember when it comes to The Education of Asa Paxton. What looks like a sweet coming-of-age historical novel is laced with enough Southern Gothic atmosphere to make William Faulkner proud. While the story starts off in 1932 Chicago with a twelve-year-old Asa Paxton and his family, [...]

Miracle Strip   By Matthew Layne   Brick Road Poetry Press, 2023  Paperback: $16.95  Genre: Poetry   Reviewed by Jason Gordy Walker  Matthew Layne’s poetry has received much recognition in the Alabama literary scene since the release of Miracle Strip, his debut collection totaling fifty-seven poems, in 2023. The Alabama State Poetry Society named the collection its 2024 Book of the Year, and Layne also received the 2025 Alabama Author Award for Poetry from the Alabama Library Association. A founding member of the controversial [...]

Something to Look Forward To  By Fannie Flagg  Random House, 2025  Hardcover, $29  Genre: Short fiction  Reviewed by Jay Lamar   What do Velma Ruth Vanderhoff, a lifelong resident of Cottonwood, KS, and a “sweet-looking apple dumpling of a lady,” and Special Agent William Frawley, recently deployed to Earth by his boss, the “chief galactic observer on Planet 8676,” have in common? Well, for one thing, they both spring from the vivid imagination of one of Alabama’s most beloved writers, Fannie Flagg. [...]

Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America  By Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin  Island Press, 2025  Hardcover: $32.00  Genre: Nonfiction, Environmental Policy, Nature Conservation   Reviewed by Stephen W. Russell   For those who call Alabama home, state pride runs deep. Even when Alabama folk cannot agree on their football affiliations or their favorite barbecue, the Southern sense of home binds those born here. But in the new book, Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America, investigative reporters Sharon Udasin and [...]

The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis  By Emma Bolden   Soft Skull Press, 2022  Paperback: $17.95  Genre: Memoir  Reviewed by Sarah Cheshire  In 1900, a teenage Viennese girl, known pseudonymously as “Dora,” was sent by her father to see Dr. Sigmund Freud after experiencing years of “unilateral headaches… [resulting] from attacks of nervous coughing,” which had been written off by her family physician as “purely nervous.”1 After months of psychoanalysis, including a deep dive into Dora’s [...]

Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama   By Alexis Okeowo   Henry Holt and Co., 2025    Hardcover: $28.99   Genre: Memoir   Reviewed by Edward Journey     In June, I read an article titled “What Happened to the Women of #MeToo?” by Alexis Okeowo, a New Yorker staff writer. It focuses on Tina Johnson, one of the Alabama women who accused Judge Roy Moore of sexual assault during his 2017 U.S. Senate campaign. It was one of those stories that I found myself [...]

My Heresies  By Alina Stefanescu  Sarabande Books, 2025  Paperback: $17.95  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Laura Secord  Alina Stefanescu's collection, My Heresies, is wrapped with birds and sky and filled with loss, accusations, beauty, and betrayal. It broke my heart and left me returning again and again for a deeper understanding of its questions and its answers.  Stefanescu’s initial poem, “Byline, Be Sky,” is a teaser for her telling through poetic forms and musical language:  Through bears and blackbirds, under linden trees [...]

The Boomerang  By Robert Bailey  Thomas and Mercer, 2025  Hardcover: $28.99  Genre: Suspense Thriller  Reviewed by Edward Journey  In the 1970s, there was a spate of excellent movies, usually adapted from a book, which were paranoid political thrillers. Among the best of these are All the President’s Men, The China Syndrome, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor. All reflect a growing distrust of the authorities. These films come to mind while reading Robert Bailey’s The Boomerang, [...]

Under the Heron’s Light  By Randi Pink  Feiwel & Friends, 2024  Hardcover: $21.99  Genre: Young Adult  Reviewed by Lynn Lamere    Randi Pink’s Under the Heron’s Light is an entertaining introduction to the relatively new genre of magical realism (not to be confused with fantasy). A quick Google search explains the different fantasy types, such as dark, low, high, speculative, historical, comic, contemporary, and magical. Closest in style to magical realism is low fantasy, or intrusion fantasy, which is defined as [...]

Florilegium poetica  Edited by Sue Brannan Walker and Saundra Scribner Grace  Negative Capability Press, 2024  Paper: $18  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Jessica Jones    Florilegium poetica wanders through hedgerows, courtyards, and blossoms throughout Mobile Botanical Gardens. Poetry comes alive here—grows stronger with each poet’s nutrients, water, pruning, humming soft words of encouragement, lyrics, and rhyme. The pattern of pages weaves a tapestry of rich flora as notes of sweetness, sour, savory, and bitterness spill out to feed another reader, another writer, [...]

A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom: The Life of Elisha Tyson  Edited by Joshua D. Rothman  University of Georgia Press, 2025  Paper: $24.95  Genre: History, Biography   Reviewed by Elijah Gaddis     If you’ve heard of Elisha Tyson, you’re probably an historian.  Like so many other figures of the past, his name and image are now cloaked in obscurity. His biography has been fodder for a few scholars of the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But for [...]

Out Loud Huntsville: A Year in Review 2024  Edited by Kimberly Casey  Out Loud HSV, 2025  Paperback: $12.00  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Foster Dickson     Out Loud Huntsville’s ninth Year in Review anthology contains poems from twenty-six distinctly diverse writers, who dub themselves a “spoken word community.” The anthology, edited by Kimberly Casey, is organized alphabetically by the poets’ last names, or in the case of one, by his only name. The author bios at the end of the book reveal [...]

Black in Blues: How A Color Tells the Story of My People  By Imani Perry  Ecco, 2025  Hardcover: $18.73, Paperback: $17.99  Genre: Nonfiction, Essays  Reviewed by Cynthia Tucker    The natural world is full of blue — blue skies, blue seas, blue flowers, blue birds. Black life is full of the color blue, too, as Imani Perry brilliantly illustrates in her newest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Perry, a Harvard University professor, award-winning [...]

Derelict Days in That Derelict Town: New and Uncollected Poems   By Alan May  BlazeVox Books, 2025  Paper: $18.00  Genre: Poetry  Reviewed by Jason Gordy Walker  Alan May, whose earlier books received praise from the likes of Bill Knott, Jake Adam York, and Maurice Manning, has gathered thirty-six poems in Derelict Days in That Derelict Town, which will delight readers who appreciate absurdity, concision, and playfulness in poetry. May casts many of his free verse poems in couplets and tercets, and he [...]

Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy  By Brooke Champagne  University of Georgia Press; 2024  Paperback: $25.95  Genre: Memoir in Essays  Reviewed by Edward Journey    In Nola Face, Brooke Champagne, Ecuadorian-French-Sicilian-American, conjures the intensity of a New Orleans upbringing in neighborhoods beyond the streetcar routes and tourist districts. Shock, sorrow, pain, joy, ecstasy, and hilarity co-exist in the space of a few short blocks and a few well-chosen sentences. Her family is introduced in its complexity and contradiction. [...]

54 Miles   By Leonard Pitts, Jr.    Agate Bolden, 2024    Paperback: $19.95   Genre: Historical Fiction    Reviewed by Julian Jones    Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator Leonard Pitts, Jr., 54 Miles is an emotionally well-written third-person historical fiction drama that centers on the human condition of an interracial family confronting its dark past as America undergoes transformational change from its dark, racist underbelly. Pitts digs deep into the harsh realities Black Americans faced in Selma as they struggled for basic human rights amid [...]

The Medici Curse By Daco S. Auffenorde Scarlet; 2025 Paperback: $23.95 Genre: Suspense Fiction Reviewed by Edward Journey In The Medici Curse, Daco S. Auffenorde introduces a scrappy and reckless protagonist named Anna de’ Medici Rossi, a Tuscan villa built over caves and secret passages, and a cursed ruby and diamond family heirloom, the Medici Falchion. In a tragedy related to Anna’s childhood night terrors, Anna’s mother, an opera diva named Vittoria de’ Medici, is killed, and [...]

A Carpetbagger in Reverse: Arthur W. Mitchell, America’s First Black Democratic Congressman  By John Morris Knapp  The University of Alabama Press, 2024  Paperback: $34.95  Genre: Nonfiction, Political History  Reviewed by Bill Plott   Fifty years from now, some of today’s biggest names in music, sports, and politics may surprisingly be hardly remembered. Indeed, as author John Morris Knapp says of this biography’s subject: “He has virtually disappeared from the national historical narrative, much like Communist officials out of favor in Stalin’s Soviet [...]

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America   By Kathleen DuVal   Random House, 2024  Genre: Nonfiction, Indigenous History   Reviewed by Philip J. Carr    The existence of a sovereign nation of Muscogee (Creek) today in Alabama comes, in my experience, as a surprise to many. General recollections of the War of 1812, signed treaties, the Trail of Tears, and Manifest Destiny combine to create the notion that no Native nations continue to exist, and certainly not east of the Mississippi River. The [...]

Razed by TV Sets   By Jason McCall  Autofocus Books, 2024  Paperback: $16.00  Genre: Creative nonfiction  Reviewed by Jacqueline Allen Trimble    Jason McCall’s Razed by TV Sets is a thoughtful exploration of what it means to be a millennial coming of age during a time of growing commercialization, rising racial violence, and the steady realization that our heroes are as human as we are, so no one is coming to save us. The book is divided into three sections, each titled [...]

Under the Sun: A Black Journalist’s Journey   By Harold Jackson   The University of Alabama Press, 2025   Paperback: $29.95  Genre: Memoir   Reviewed by C.G. Crawford      In Under the Sun: A Black Journalist's Journey, Harold Jackson offers a personal account of his life and hopeful legacy as one of America's last real newspapermen. As the printing press days of fact-based news, corporate newspaper politics, and news editorials die at the hands of the digital beast that is social media, artificial intelligence, podcasts, [...]

With Our Bellies Full and the Fire Dying   By Debra H. Goldstein  White City Press, 2025  Paperback: $13.00  Genre: Mystery, Short Fiction   Reviewed by Joe Cuhaj     Some of you may be too young to remember the days of pulp mystery magazines like Ellery Queen Mysteries, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mysteries, and Master Detective. Each month, these magazines brought readers the best short fiction mysteries by the world's best up-and-coming writers. Some remain to this day (now as online magazines like Ellery Queen), still [...]

Physicians for the People: Black Doctors and the Struggle for Health-Care Equality in Alabama, 1870-1970  By Jack D. Ellis  The University of Alabama Press, 2025  Reviewed by Stephen W. Russell, MD  Professor Jack D. Ellis’s fifth book, Physicians for the People: Black Doctors and the Struggle for Health-Care Equality in Alabama, 1870-1970, begins in Tuskegee. Fifty years before the unethical U.S. Public Health study that withheld treatment from 400 Black men with a treatable disease, the Tuskegee Institute represented a bright [...]