A Magazine for Literature of the American South
Charity Hawkins, 2012, Familyman Ministries, 229 pp, $12.99, 978-1937639068 Julianne Miller, the protagonist of The Homeschool Experiment, a novel, homeschooled her three children last year with mixed results. This year she is determined to do better. With a little organization, lots of patience, and a network of supportive friends, Julianne learns how to focus on what [...]
Review by Allen Mendenhall BelleBooks. 118 pages. I’ve always maintained a spectator’s curiosity in the rituals and practices of photography. I can’t take a good picture, no matter which side of the camera I’m on, but I appreciate the idea of reducing the world to a more manageable form, something I can look at [...]
Review by Tina Egnoski In Kirby Gann’s new book, Ghosting, Kentucky is raw-edged, poverty-stricken and violent. It is also a place of physical beauty and, for some, of personal redemption. The protagonist James Cole Prather, known as Cole, is twenty-three and at loose ends. He lives with his mother Lyda, an addict. His half-brother Fleece [...]
Review by Philip K. Jason University of New Orleans Press. 272 pages. $15.95 Imagining a Mississippi Delta area significantly transformed by decades of ferocious hurricanes, Moira Crone takes us to a realm of islands where immortals rule and the rest live lives of aspiration or rebellion in a caste-bound, static society. Who wouldn’t want to [...]
Review by Peggy Kassees Take a small Southern town. Add a mental institute for the criminally insane, one of the most beautiful rivers in Florida, and characters so vibrant they stay in the reader’s heart and mind like longtime friends and family. Then throw in Rhett DeVane’s exquisite sense of humor and finely tuned writing. [...]
Review by Rhett DeVane Lugging painful emotional baggage is difficult enough, but carting that baggage back to a small Mississippi town after ten years takes courage. When twenty-eight-year-old Avery Pritchett returns home to Greendale—“a place where racism reaches as deep and dark as the bottom of Alligator Lake”—for her brother’s wedding, she has more to [...]
Review by Philip K. Jason Poisoned Pen Press. 306 pages. $24.95 hardback, $14.95 trade paper. This latest adventure of Ms. Evans’ protagonist, archaeologist Faye Longchamp, has many centers of interest. Faye is at work in the area where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. That is, she is in Louisiana not far from [...]
Reviewed by Patricia O’Sullivan High school art teacher Graciela ‘Ace’ Jones thinks she has a big derriere, but in her hometown of Bugtussle, Mississippi, Ace is better known for her big mouth. In fact, Ace’s rants are famous in Bugtussle – like the time she stood up to a pack of mean girls bullying her [...]