I loved this beautiful book because it took me back to my own childhood as an outsider in rural Georgia, a time when I was lonesome and frightened.
If only I had access to a novel tender and poignant as Red Clay Suzie growing up, I would have experienced much needed representation of myself within the pages, discovering a sort of transcendent hopefulness and acceptance I was desperate to find.
The coming-of-age story of Philbet, a gay, physically-misshapen boy in rural Georgia, who battles bullying, ignorance, and disdain as he makes his way in life as an outsider-before finding acceptance in unlikely places.
Fueled by tomato sandwiches and green milkshakes, and obsessed with cars, Philbet struggles with life and love as a gay boy in rural Georgia. He's happiest when helping Grandaddy dig potatoes from the vegetable garden that connects their houses. But Philbet's world is shattered and his resilience shaken by events that crush his innocence and sense of security; expose his misshapen…
I loved this book because it checks so many boxes that are important to me: a unique voice, a fascinating female protagonist, Southern gothic, literary, and imaginative.
Over the course of two days, I devoured this book, a book challenging a southern landscape I thought I knew while spectacularly shifting the traditional conventions of storytelling.
At the age of seventy-one, the recluse Amelia finally leaves her home in the North Carolina mountains to find the world grown strange and almost deserted. In her quest to unravel the mysteries of this apocalyptic landscape, she encounters a neighbor turned into an apple tree, children trapped in mica, and her doppelganger. Between these events, she reflects on the recent death of her immigrant father and the disastrous love affair with a woman that sent her into seclusion for half a century. Eventually, Amelia meets up with the time-stranded and dying Sir Walter Scott, who becomes an unwilling companion.…
A lover of language, character, plot, and place, I was hooked and hog-tied from the first page. Sometimes I like to feel lonesome. Sometimes I like to cry. Sometimes I want to be haunted by a book and never want it to end. Sometimes I want to find myself another To Kill A Mockingbird. Guess what? With One Good Mama Bone, I did.
Set in the early 1950s rural South, One Good Mama Bone chronicles Sarah Creamer's quest to find her "mama bone" after she is left to care for a boy who is not her own but instead is the product of an affair between her husband and her best friend and neighbor, a woman she calls "Sister." When her husband drinks himself to death, Sarah, a dirt-poor homemaker with no family to rely on and the note on the farm long past due, must find a way for her and young Emerson Bridge to survive. But the more daunting obstacle is…
The summer of 1956, a brood of cicadas descends upon Providence Georgia, a natural event with supernatural repercussions, unhinging the life of Analeise Newell, an eleven-year-old piano prodigy. Amidst this emergence, dark obsessions are stirred, uncanny gifts provoked, and secrets unearthed.
During a visit to Mistletoe, a plantation owned by the wealthy Mayfield family, Analeise encounters Cordelia Mayfield and her daughter Marlissa, both of whom possess an otherworldly beauty. A whisper and an act of violence perpetrated during this visit by Mrs. Mayfield all converge to kindle Analeise’s fascination with the Mayfields.
Analeise’s burgeoning obsession with the Mayfield family overshadows her own seemingly, ordinary life, culminating in dangerous games and manipulation, setting off a chain of cataclysmic events with life-altering consequences.
