Junie (Ballantine 2025) by Erin Crosby Eckstine is a vividly drawn work of historical fiction, set in the antebellum South, which features a complex, fully realized 16-year-old enslaved teen named Junie. While the title character is the heart and soul of the novel, other characters—good, bad, and hovering in between—fill the pages in this haunting, […]
“Like Zeros, Like Pearls” by Lola Haskins
September 30, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Judging from her exceptional poems in Like Zeros, Like Pearls (Charlotte Lit Press 2025), award-winning poet Lola Haskins has both a scientific and a literary bent to her world view. In this new and glorious collection, she showcases both. Like the cicadas in her poem “The Spirituality of Cicadas,” creatures believed by ancient Chinese to […]
“Lake County” by Lori Roy
October 21, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Lake County by Edgar Award–winning author Lori Roy (Thomas & Mercer 2024) is a treasure of a historical mystery/thriller suspense novel. The story is well imagined, and charming, even with its violence. Exuberantly paced, it is a complicated work with a dash of noir and a righteous dose of historical Tampa, Florida. Many smaller stories […]
Claire Hamner Matturro interviews Dr. Allen P. Mendenhall, author of “A Glooming Peace This Morning”
March 5, 2024 by 1 Comment
Introduction: Allen Mendenhall served as editor and publisher of Southern Literary Review for a decade, and when Associate Editor Claire Hamner Matturro discovered he had written his first novel, A Glooming Peace This Morning, she reached out for an interview. Mendenhall has written eight non-fiction books, including Of Bees and Boys: Lines from a Southern Lawyer […]
“how small, confronting morning” by Lola Haskins
October 19, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Poet Lola Haskins’s enthusiasm for her adopted state of Florida is expressed with grace, power, and beauty in how small, confronting morning (Jacar Press 2016; released as ebook 2021), a collection of thirty-five poems. The words and images captured in the book quietly yet passionately evoke a wild and natural Florida that is being lost […]
Claire Hamner Matturro reviews “No Names to Be Given” and interviews the author Julia Brewer Daily
September 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment
THE BOOK Julia Brewer Daily’s, novel, No Names to Be Given (Admission Press, 2021) is an evocative and sensitive novel about three young women from vastly different backgrounds who face unwed pregnancies in the 1960’s Deep South. Sandy, Faith, and Becca become roommates in a New Orleans maternity home hospital for unwed mothers and gradually […]