Fireworks, fireflies, and gunfire light up Phyllis Gobbell’s exquisite, poignant novel Prodigal (Histria Fiction 2024). This modern retelling of the prodigal son is, above all, a story of love and forgiveness in a Southern family. A Baptist preacher’s son, nineteen-year-old Connor Burdette flees from his hometown of Montpier, Tennessee, after a boy he is with […]
Books of Note: “Can’t Shake the Dust”; “Faulkner, Welty, Wright”; and “Before We Left the Land”
February 3, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Can’t Shake the Dust Can’t Shake the Dust (Regal House Publishing 2024) by C.H. Hooks employs three points of view to paint a full picture of a dysfunctional family in South Georgia. The alcoholic father and son are obsessed with racing—even though the father lost a leg in a racetrack accident. The recovering addict mother […]
“Penalties of June” by John Brandon
February 1, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Penalties of June (McSweeney’s 2024) by John Brandon is a well-crafted, invitingly atmospheric tale of a motley group of anti-heroes and a lovely, hard-working young woman in 1998 Florida. These characters cross fortunes and fates as their lives interlace again—and again—in a tale that carries a hint of the Southern Gothic within its absorbing pages. Kirkus […]
“Gothictown” by Emily Carpenter
January 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Most times in life when things seem too good to be true, they are. Such is the case in Emily Carpenter’s latest novel, Gothictown (Kensington, 2025). If you liked Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” you are bound to enjoy the mysteries hidden behind the innocent façade of Gothictown. Carpenter begins the novel with brief […]
The Professor’s Bayonet Podcast of “Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood” by Paula Delgado-Kling
January 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Dr. Jason Dew has released a podcast of Paula Delgado-Kling’s Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood, which Dew previously reviewed for SLR. Check out his podcast.
“Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood” by Paula Delgado-Kling
January 13, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Paula Delgado-Kling’s aptly named book, Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood (OR Books 2024), details in vivid and sticky language the plight of a poor Columbian girl whose destiny could never be anything else but what it was: a tangled, complicated, and, ultimately, violent relationship with the only authority that even pretended to care about […]