If you have never visited Black Mountain, North Carolina, by the time you finish reading Sarah Loudin Thomas’s These Blue Mountains (Bethany House 2025) you will want to pack your bags and go. Fans of Kim Michele Richardson’s The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch, and Annette Clapsaddle’s Even As We […]
“Measure of Devotion” by Nell Joslin
November 3, 2025 by Leave a Comment
In her novel Measure of Devotion (Regal House 2025) Nell Joslin takes readers on an intensely personal, first-person journey of rescue during the American Civil War. With blunt-force realism and eloquent descriptive prose, she brings to life the pervasive brutality and sporadic heroism, as well as deprivations, of the nation’s darkest time: “Their eyes crawled […]
“Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories” by Les Brown
September 30, 2025 by 1 Comment
Reviewed by Jeanne Malmgren If anything is synonymous with Appalachian heritage, it’s the art of storytelling. For generations, highlanders have sat on front porches and under trees, spinning yarns that are sometimes true, sometimes a little “stretched.” When Les Brown was a boy, he listened keenly to the oral history of his forebears—and now, in […]
“Half-Truths” by Carol Baldwin
September 15, 2025 by 1 Comment
Introduction: Carol Baldwin spent eighteen years researching and writing her latest book, Half-Truths (Monarch Educational Services 2025). I can’t even imagine. I spent about six years on my first novel, and that felt like an eternity. But Baldwin seems to love research, an important quality for someone taking on a historical fiction novel set at […]
“In the Fullness of Time” by Terry Roberts
September 3, 2025 by Leave a Comment
More than just a compelling mystery or a well-executed police procedural—though it is both—In the Fullness of Time (Turner Publishing, 2025) offers profound reflections on the nature of time itself. Roberts masterfully weaves together past, present, and future in ways that feel almost magical. His lyrical descriptions of the mountains and valleys of North Carolina […]
“Break My Fall” by Lynn H. Blackburn
May 4, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Alana Pate Break My Fall (Revell 2025) by Lynn H. Blackburn is an exceptional read about Meredith Quinn, a dentist who moves back to her small hometown Gossamer Falls, North Carolina. This story is about love and an investigation of the drug world of Neeson County, which neighbors Gossamer Falls. It hooked me […]