Here are 67 books that Melting the Blues fans have personally recommended if you like
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Having grown up in segregated Knoxville, TN, I've often wondered what having a black friend as a child would have been like. My MFA thesis, in the 1980s, was a novella about just such a friendship. A small group of my (white) MFA classmates insisted that I could not, should not write about black characters. Although I believed them to be mistaken, I put my thesis away and haven’t looked at it since. About ten years ago, I decided to try again. I took an early draft of a new novel to a workshop with John Dufresne, who encouraged me to continue. The result was Beginning with Cannonballs, which received positive reviews and won the 2021 IPPY Silver Medal for Multicultural Fiction.
I loved the way the mystery at the heart of this novel was so slowly and stunningly revealed. Why does Isabelle, an elderly white woman in Texas, want Dorrie, her much younger black hairdresser, to drive her all the way to Ohio for a funeral? It seems a lot to ask of a friend. The answer lies in a secret Isabelle has kept since she was a teenager in 1930s Kentucky.
A moving love story inspired by a true story and perfect for fans of The Help
In a time of hate, would you stand up for love?
Shalerville, Kentucky, 1939. A world where black maids and handymen are trusted to raise white children and tend to white houses, but from which they are banished after dark.
Sixteen-year-old Isabelle McAllister, born into wealth and privilege, finds her ordered life turned upside down when she becomes attracted to Robert, the ambitious black son of her family's housekeeper. Before long Isabelle and Robert are crossing extraordinary, dangerous boundaries and falling deeply in love.…
Having grown up in segregated Knoxville, TN, I've often wondered what having a black friend as a child would have been like. My MFA thesis, in the 1980s, was a novella about just such a friendship. A small group of my (white) MFA classmates insisted that I could not, should not write about black characters. Although I believed them to be mistaken, I put my thesis away and haven’t looked at it since. About ten years ago, I decided to try again. I took an early draft of a new novel to a workshop with John Dufresne, who encouraged me to continue. The result was Beginning with Cannonballs, which received positive reviews and won the 2021 IPPY Silver Medal for Multicultural Fiction.
Given that this novel is set in Mississippi in the 1950s, I was intrigued by the teen-aged friendship at its center. When Cassie, who’s black, and Judith, who’s white, learn that they have the same father, they decide to join forces in claiming their share of the family inheritance. The result is a sometimes perilous and even other-worldly road trip from Mississippi to Virginia, during which the girls’ budding relationship is sorely tested.
A spellbinding debut about half sisters, one black and one white, on a 1950s road trip through the American South
Self-educated and brown-skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother’s laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for “colored music” and dreams of life as a big city radio star. These teenaged girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father’s inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes to a road trip together to claim what’s rightly theirs.
In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars…
Having grown up in segregated Knoxville, TN, I've often wondered what having a black friend as a child would have been like. My MFA thesis, in the 1980s, was a novella about just such a friendship. A small group of my (white) MFA classmates insisted that I could not, should not write about black characters. Although I believed them to be mistaken, I put my thesis away and haven’t looked at it since. About ten years ago, I decided to try again. I took an early draft of a new novel to a workshop with John Dufresne, who encouraged me to continue. The result was Beginning with Cannonballs, which received positive reviews and won the 2021 IPPY Silver Medal for Multicultural Fiction.
Remembering its excellent character portrayals, I re-read this book when I began writing my own novel about an interracial friendship. Set in Kentucky, Stranger Here Below depicts the friendship that develops when outgoing Maze (short for Amazing Grace) and staid Mary Elizabeth room together at Berea College in the 1960s. Mary Elizabeth, who’s quiet and musically talented, is the daughter of a black preacher, while Maze is a chatty Appalachian girl. Although the friendship is interrupted when Mary Elizabeth abruptly leaves school, the two women try, years later, to revive it.
In 1961, when Amazing Grace Jansen, a firecracker from Appalachia, meets Mary Elizabeth Cox, the daughter of a Black southern preacher, at Kentucky's Berea College, they already carry the scars and traces of their mothers' troubles. Poor and single, Maze's mother has had to raise her daughter alone and fight to keep a roof over their heads. Mary Elizabeth's mother has carried a shattering grief throughout her life, a loss so great that it has disabled her and isolated her stern husband and her brilliant, talented daughter. The caution this has scored into Mary Elizabeth has made her defensive and…
Having grown up in segregated Knoxville, TN, I've often wondered what having a black friend as a child would have been like. My MFA thesis, in the 1980s, was a novella about just such a friendship. A small group of my (white) MFA classmates insisted that I could not, should not write about black characters. Although I believed them to be mistaken, I put my thesis away and haven’t looked at it since. About ten years ago, I decided to try again. I took an early draft of a new novel to a workshop with John Dufresne, who encouraged me to continue. The result was Beginning with Cannonballs, which received positive reviews and won the 2021 IPPY Silver Medal for Multicultural Fiction.
I’d never read a novel like this. The chapters are similar to diary entries, telling the fictional story of a middle-aged white woman who moves into her childhood home. Over the years, due to “city planning,” East of Troost (an actual neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri) has become nearly all-black. Readers will wonder: Why the heck did the narrator decide to move back there? How will she be treated? Will she have any friends? You’ll enjoy finding out.
Under the guise of a starting-over story, this novel deals with subtle racism today, overt racism in the past, and soul-searching about what to do about it in everyday living.
East of Troost's fictional narrator has moved back to her childhood home in a neighborhood that is now mostly Black and vastly changed by an expressway that displaced hundreds of families. It is the area located east of Troost Avenue, an invisible barrier created in the early 1900s to keep the west side of Kansas City white, "safely" cordoned off from the Black families on the east side.
There are places one feels at home, even though not from there. The South does that to me. I'm drawn to its exotic beauty—the magnolias and moss. It's deep porches and melodic accents. There is a degree of tranquility that hangs over it, veiling the repulsive scars of years of master-slave culture. The South is the perfect backdrop for the themes that appeal to me—coming-of-age, political unrest, and social activism. These excellent Southern novels below all place the reader deep in the culture.
I know the words poignant and Shakespearean are almost cliché when describing stories, but I say, "If the cliché fits, use it."
I love good vs. evil stories, especially if they're set in the South. This one delivers. Forbidden love in the 1950's Jim Crow South is fertile soil for missteps and trouble. During a summer visit to her grandmother's, Catherine's naiveté about the way things were in the South back then made me anxious for her and Jimmy. Their mixed-race attraction for each other was doomed from the start. Part romance, part thriller, I found the suspense in this book powerful.
Arkansas Summer is a powerful novel about love and racial terror in the Jim Crow South. It's 1955, and Catherine has joined her father in Arkansas after her grandfather's death. She's a California college student, and it's her first visit to her grandparents' farm since the summer she was nine. When she is reunited with Jimmy, whom she'd played with as a child, the two are immediately drawn to one another. They understand the dangers of their interracial attraction, but could never have imagined the far-reaching consequences of their untimely love. Arkansas Summer takes readers on an emotional journey of…
I have a youthful spirit, but an old soul. Perhaps, that’s why I love African American history and gravitated to Black Studies as my undergraduate degree. My reverence for my ancestors sends me time and again to African-American historical fiction in an effort to connect with our past. Growing up, I was that kid who liked being around my elders and eavesdropping on grown-ups' conversations. Now, I listen to my ancestors as they guide my creativity. I’m an award-winning hybrid author writing contemporary and historical novels, and I value each. Still, it’s those historical characters and tales that snatch me by the hand and passionately urge me to do their bidding.
Once upon a time, I was the founder and president of a book club, Literary Ladies Alliance. Many moons ago, LLA chose Sugar as our monthly reading selection. I was absolutely floored by this unlikely, unconventional heroine of the same name as the novel set in a small southern town that wasn’t ready for this seductive storm, i.e. Sugar. I found her shockingly bold and beautifully unapologetic despite her disreputable past and “questionable morals.” She hungered for love, endured dangerous risks and scandal; and yet for me, Sugar moved with an air of voluptuous freedom that captivated my church girl imagination and respect. While Dianne McKinney Whetstone is my favorite author, Sugar is undoubtedly my favorite novel! I’ve read the book twice and would readily devour it again for its captivating journey back in time and its uncharacteristic, boldly unforgettable heroine.
20th Anniversary Edition—with a New Foreword by Kimberly Elise
A novel by a critically acclaimed voice in contemporary fiction, praised by Ebony for its “unforgettable images, unique characters, and moving story that keeps the pages turning until the end.”
A young prostitute comes to Bigelow, Arkansas, to start over, far from her haunting past. Sugar moves next door to Pearl, who is still grieving for the daughter who was murdered fifteen years before. Over sweet-potato pie, an unlikely friendship begins, transforming both women's lives—and the life of an entire town.
Sugar brings a Southern African-American town vividly to life, with…
I’m a writer and a lifelong baseball fan with a weakness for baseball-ish fiction. For a lot of folks, this means reading the usual suspects: Kinsella, Malamud, Coover, Roth, DeLillo... But I especially enjoy stumbling across under-the-radar novels that can’t help but surprise in their own ways. I enjoy this so much, in fact, I went out and wrote one of my own – inspired by the life and career of an all-but-forgotten ballplayer from the 1880s named Fred “Sure Shot” Dunlap, one of the greats of the game in his time. In the stuff of his life there was the stuff of meaning and moment… of the sort you’ll find in the books I’m recommending here.
I was working as a flak at Simon & Schuster when this book came out, and I helped to write the flap copy, so it feels to me like I had a hand in it. As an aspiring writer, I remember admiring the hell out of this novel. On a recent re-read, as a grizzled, wizened veteran writer, I still do. Hays gives us a collection of memorable characters, and a wild, vagabonding tale that offers a glimpse at minor league life in the deep South. There’s humor and heartache and all that good stuff.
An account of a season with baseball team, the Arkansas Reds. Their line-up includes an ex-con first baseman, a couple of real Reds on loan from Castro, young bucks on the way up and old-timers on the way down, all led by a one-armed Marxist and ex-major leaguer named Lefty.
As a white child bused to African American schools in Richmond, Virginia in the 1970s, I unwittingly stepped into a Civil Rights experiment that would shatter social norms and put me on a path to learning history not taught in textbooks. At first, I never expected to look back at this fraught time. Then I had children. The more I tried to tell them about my past, the more I wanted to understand the context. Why did we fall so short of America’s founding ideals? I have been reading and writing about American history ever since, completing a master’s degree and publishing books, essays, and poems.
One of nine Black students to integrate the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, Beals faces threats to her life as well as constant cruelty not only from white people but also from members of her own community, who disapprove of her decision. Her book gives us an unflinching account of what it feels like to be inside the maelstrom. Education seems almost beside the point when she needs protection from the National Guard. Most resonant to me, Beals admits that being a warrior for social change is exhausting. “Sometimes,” she writes in her diary, “I just need to be a girl.”
In this essential autobiographical account by one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most powerful figures, Melba Pattillo Beals of the Little Rock Nine explores not only the oppressive force of racism, but the ability of young people to change ideas of race and identity.
In 1957, well before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Melba Pattillo Beals and eight other teenagers became iconic symbols for the Civil Rights Movement and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the American South as they integrated Little Rock’s Central High School in the wake of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown…
I was born in Georgia but grew up in Florida during Jim Crow. My earliest memory of racism was when my mother took me downtown to buy new school shoes. I grew thirsty, so I went to drink from the “colored” water fountain. My young mind may have been attracted to water that might have been blue or pink or green. Quickly my mother whisked me to the “white” fountain, and it was then that I first began to question the racism that was part of my Southern heritage. I wrote Spite Fences to explore the historical barriers erected against equal treatment for African-Americans. All of those prohibitions are fences, limiting opportunity, begging to be torn down.
I had long been familiar with the events of Little Rock Central High, having read books, articles, and online accounts of the attempt to integrate this Arkansas school. I found The Lions of Little Rock an accurate and compelling novel that provides young adults with a masterful introduction to how attempts to integrate the Jim Crow South impacted its children. Built on the seminal events to integrate Arkansas’s Little Rock High in 1958, the friendship of young Marlee and Liz portrays how segregation damages not just communities, but friendships. Young adults will be pulled in by Levine’s blend of plot, humor, and emotion to make this a memorable work of historical fiction that may inspire young readers to engage in the cause of civil rights.
"Satisfying, gratifying, touching, weighty—this authentic piece of work has got soul."—The New York Times Book Review
As twelve-year-old Marlee starts middle school in 1958 Little Rock, it feels like her whole world is falling apart. Until she meets Liz, the new girl at school. Liz is everything Marlee wishes she could be: she's brave, brash and always knows the right thing to say. But when Liz leaves school without even a good-bye, the rumor is that Liz was caught passing for white. Marlee decides that doesn't matter. She just wants her friend back. And to stay friends, Marlee and Liz…
I came of age reading Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier, and Phyllis Whitney by flashlight after my school night bedtimes. Their plots mingled romance and murder so elegantly, heightening the already incredible stakes of whether they would physically survive intertwined with the anxiety over the couple’s relationship surviving. All these years later, I still love a good story that makes me wonder how in the world the pair will make it through danger—and if there’ll be a kiss at the end.
It’s hard to go home again after you’ve lived outside the state for several years, but coming home knowing everyone thinks you’ve killed a man after his body turns up? Well, that’s a great way to open a book, and it just gets better.
Kelly Ford always paints a nuanced picture of Arkansas, juxtaposing the region’s beauty and potential with the poverty and reality of actually growing up there. The relationship between Janie and her high school love interest, Gloria, builds beautifully with a plot twist I didn’t see coming.
From the author of Cottonmouths, a Los Angeles Review Best Book of 2017, comes an evocative suspense about the cost of keeping secrets and the dangers of coming home.
Beneath the roiling waters of the Arkansas River lie dead men and buried secrets.
When Jane Mooney's violent stepfather, Warren, disappeared, most folks in Maud Bottoms, Arkansas, assumed he got drunk and drowned. After all, the river had claimed its share over the years.
When Jane confessed to his murder, she should have gone to jail. That's what she wanted. But without a body, the police didn't charge her with the…
