Archive for Southern Fiction
You are browsing the archives of Southern Fiction.
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Nicola)
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
Pages: 335
First Published: Oct. 5, 2010
Publisher: William Morrow
Rating: 4/5
First sentence:
The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.
Acquired: Received a review copy from Harper Collins Canada.
Reason for Reading: I love southern fiction and am always intrigued with stories where the past comes back to haunt the lives of those living in the present.
It’s the late 1970’s, rural Mississippi and white Larry Ott from a lower middle class home and black Silas Jones son of a poor working single mother, make for strange friends. But friends they are, though they have to keep it secret because of their colour, everyone, including their parents would cause a fuss, but as the years go by they drift apart. Silas becomes a jock baseball player eventually moving away to play college baseball. Larry, always a loner, likes horror books and comics, goes out on his first date and the girl disappears forever. No evidence or body is ever found but for the next 25 years Larry is ostracized as the likely killer of the missing girl. Now Silas is back, a constable of a nearby town, and when another girl goes missing all eyes focus once again on Larry.
This is an emotional, poignant story that focuses on many levels. It is a story of a close, bonding, but brief childhood friendship and a story of race relations in a variety of complicated situations. The most profound theme found here though is the burying of deep secrets of the past and leaving them to rot. The harm and destruction they can cause when no one comes forth to tell the truth and the turmoil caused when decades later the secrets are brought forth into the light.
This is a somewhat slow moving story, which centers mostly on the relationship of the two men, the secrets of the past which they each are only partially aware of, and how their lives have been affected. The crime is in the background and keeps the plot moving forward as well as giving cohesion to the meandering narrative which drifts back to the past and forwards to the present. Personally, I didn’t find the crime or the secrets very hard to figure out knowing quite early on how things would probably turn out. However, the story is certainly character driven and I highly enjoyed spending time with Larry Ott and Silas Jones, though one more than the other. Somewhat dark emotionally, yet not all doom and gloom, with an ending that may not leave you feeling all fuzzy; I found it a satisfying ending and am enticed to looking into Mr. Franklin’s previous novels.
A Little Death in Dixie (Nicola)
A Little Death in Dixie by Lisa Turner
Pages: 298
First Published: Jun. 4, 2010
Publisher: Bell Bridge Books
Rating: 4/5
First sentence:
Cops like me won’t admit it out loud, but a lot of us believe murder has its right time and proper reason.
Acquired: Received a review copy from Bell Bridge Books.
Reason for Reading: I love Southern fiction and am always game for mixing my favourite genres, this time with a crime mystery.
The publisher’s blurb tells us that a notorious socialite disappears and it’s either because she’s off on another drunken spree or perhaps something more sinister has happened. Then it hints at the story being more complex. So, with only that information to go on I really was not ready for the incredibly twisting, turning, complex plot that I found myself plunged into. As the publisher’s blurb states “a complex spider’s web of tragedy, mystery, suspicion, and sordid secrets”. I thought that was typical overstatement to get one to buy the book, but no, it really describes the book in better words than I could come up with. Leaving it there, I’m not going to tell any more of the plot either, because it is best to let it all unravel not knowing what is going to come next.
I positively loved this Southern mystery which takes place in Memphis. The two main characters Detective Billy Able and Mercy Snow, sister of the missing person, are both fully fleshed, flawed and realistic characters. This is a stand alone book but I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing them turning up again in a series. Every single person in this story has a skeleton in the closet or a dark secret, no one is totally innocent, even if it be only from withholding the truth. This cast of characters are dark, devious and eccentric bringing the Gothic flavour to the suspense. As the story progresses it becomes about so much more than a missing person, various other crimes are involved and the shocking reveals come out of nowhere.
Now, I did find the plot a little over the top, somewhat unrealistic in places (but again those are common Gothic elements) and possibly unsolvable by the reader because of the plot twists. There was so much going on though that I didn’t even try to figure out who did what; I found myself just quickly turning the pages eager to find out what could possibly happen next and how it would all turn out in the end. A well-written and complex suspense novel. As Ms. Turner’s first novel, I eagerly await what she will present for an encore.
Saving CeeCee Honeycutt (Nicola)
Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman
Pages: 306
First Published: Jan. 12, 2010
Rating: 4.5/5
First sentence:
Momma left her red satin shoes in the middle of the road.
Reason for Reading: I love southern fiction with eccentric characters, then throw in mental illness to boot and you’ve so got a book I have to read.
Summary: 12-year-old CeeCee Honeycutt lives with her mother who is crazy. She relives the glorious day that she was crowned the 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen often donning her winning dress, sash and tiara, blowing kisses to cars that pass by. Always wearing ballgowns and forever going to Goodwill to purchase more. CeeCee looks after her mom as her dad has virtually left them on a traveling salesman job, rarely returning home and refusing to deal with the situation. Then tragedy strikes as her mum dies and CeeCee is picked up by her great aunt and taken to Savannah, Georgia to live.
Comments: An immensely entertaining book! Very much character driven, CeeCee enters a totally new world seemingly controlled by women of charm, etiquette and manners but also the most eccentric people she has ever met. There is Miz Goodpepper who dresses in exotic clothing and skinny dips in an old bathtub in her backyard each evening, Miz Hobbs the busybody nobody likes who secretly entertains a married policeman in a see-through yellow peignoir, Oletta Jones the cook at CeeCee’s aunt’s a firm yet loving black woman who becomes the mother CeeCee always wanted and CeeCee the daughter she once had. And this is only to mention a few!
Along with CeeCee’s encounters with these women she must come to terms with her past, the childhood she was denied and it takes the length of the book for her to do so. That in itself is the plot of the book. Taking place in the late sixties events do occur which spar with elitism, snobbery, racism, adultery, negligent fathers, the possibility of the heredity of mental illness but all are neatly solved and tucked away, as the book once quotes Scarlett O’Hara, for “tomorrow is another day”. This to me is the book’s minor downfall. It’s too sugary, sweet with a “Care Bear” ending that left me needing to brush my teeth.
For me the book’s gold lies in it’s study of character. While I simply adored the white women on Gaston Street with their parties and eccentricities, I particularly loved the black women that the cook, Oletta, introduces to CeeCee. Another complete set of eccentric characters from Aunt Sapphire in the nursing home who swears up a storm to her friend who can’t talk and likes to put small things in her brassier while everyone pretends not to notice and the one who looks like a man and tells fortunes with carved stones that come from several generations back to Africa.
A really, wonderful, delightful read of southern fiction with great characters you’ll love but I wish the author had taken on one of the issues presented to add a bit of tension that could have been resolved in the end to a plot that otherwise lacked any.
Mudbound (Teddy Rose)
Wonderful Southern Fiction
In 1939, at 31 years old, spinster, Laura meets Henry McAllen. After a bit of dating, they get married and start a family. Henry works for the Army Corps of Engineers, they’re in the city. This is great, because Laura is a city woman through and through.
One day Henry comes home with news, he has bought a farm in the Mississippi Delta and is quitting he job to farm. Of course this is quite a blow to Laura, Henry didn’t even consult her. The farmhouse has none of the conveniences that city folk take for granted such as running water, plumbing, electricity, etc. However, Henry is her husband, so Laura goes along with it.
After WWII Henry’s brother Jamie shows up at the farm. At the same time Ronsel Jackson returns home as decorated solder. He is the son of the black sharecroppers’ family living on the farm.
Ronsel and Jamie become friends, which is very risky in the Jim Crow south. This unlikely friendship is what brings this powerful novel to its grim conclusion.
Mudbound is told by each of the character’s own point of view. This technique works very well for this novel. Jordon was able to write each characters point of view so well, that it felt as if I was each character. She really enables the reader to get in side the heads of the characters.
Jordan’s prose sings! She makes the farm a kind of character itself and captures both its beauty and muddy short falls, exquisitely!
I highly recommend this book and can hardly wait for Hillary Jordan to write another novel!
5/5