The Pretender (2025) by Jo Harkin

 Audiobook Review

The Pretender (2025)

by Jo Harkin

   The Pretender is a rare 2025 Audiobook listen, written by English author Jo Harkin, one of the cover quotes describes it as "Glorious Exploits meets Wolf Hall" and I agree. Specifically, I agree with the comparison to Glorious Exploits which brought some contemporary characterization into a historical milieu while still keeping things from getting anachronistic.  There's a pot of gold for any writer of literary or historical fiction who can pull off this trick- see the endless attempts by the film industry to recharacterize and repurpose novels from the early 19th century.  Clever stuff, recommended. 

Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (1977) by Mildred D. Taylor

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (1977)

by Mildred D. Taylor

Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 3/18

  Ran out of Audiobooks in Alabama about one Audiobook in, so it is on to Mississippi and Louisiana, where the pickings are almost but not quite as slim. The rule with Audiobooks in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is no chick lit and no YA titles- everything else, including actual children's books, of which this is one.  This is a good children's book, written before kids were wimps and parents were insane.  Back in the 1970's an African American author could use the n word in a children's book and win Awards, nowadays some libraries won't even carry this title for the same reason.

  Roll of Thunder was a genuinely effective children's book, like something out of the nineteenth century and filled with the unmitigated terror of the "Night Riders" on a community of African Americans in rural Mississippi.  The protagonists is the youngest daughter of a rare family of African American property owners- with the land now in the second generation of the family.  That already makes Mississippi different than Alabama, where some of the book's detail how it was impossible for African American families to even rent, let alone own land in swathes of Alabama.   

  Many times as I listened to this Audiobook I thought about the horror movies of Jordan Peele and the idea that the African American experience in much of America is, in fact, a real-life horror film.  You look at the central family in this book: Property owning farmers, no bad habits and their very existence is an affront to their white neighbors.  These people are literally not allowed to live.  It is a deeply Unamerican environment and I think there is a strong argument that it simply is not. 

The Watsons go to Birmingham (1995) by Christopher Paul

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Watsons Go To Birmingham (1995)

by Christopher Paul

Birmingham, Alabama

Alabama: 11/18

   Arguably not a book about Birmingham since most of the book takes place in Detroit before the Watsons Go To Birmingham (right before the church bombing). This is a children's book, not a YA title, so it is pretty straightforward.  The Watsons does have a road trip, which, I think because of the map-based categorization of the titles, are sorely lacking in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  The most interesting portion of this title was, in fact, the drive itself.

    Just the fact that this family hops in a car and drives somewhere not in their neighborhood puts them in a rare subgroup of this project.  It's like, for most of the characters in these books, the idea that one might just leave the terrible place where they happen to have been born is unfathomable.  I mean, I'm talking about hundreds of books at this point.  And this observation has nothing to do with this title in particular but it's crazy how none of these books have characters who in any way, shape, or form transcend their surroundings or low beginnings.  Stasis and regression is the rule of thumb in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, and not just for the South, although that weight is heavy in Alabama. 

Looking for Alaska (2005) by John Green

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Looking for Alaska (2005)

by John Green

Culver Creek (Birmingham), Alabama

Alabama: 10/18

   I checked out the Hulu Version of this paperback- with a picture of who I presume was the actress who played the eponymous Alaska of the title.  Before I shit all over this book let me just say that I understand that John Green has multiple YA hits (The Fault in our Stars), that he is a popular YouTuber and I think Podcaster, and that he has lots of fans some of whom might actually read this post.  In other words, Looking for Alaska is a hit, and the author has other hits, but the books are terrible. 

  Set in a progressive co-ed high school and narrated by a fish-out-of-water type, Green brings together a familiar band of misfits which includes a Japanese guy buy no African American.  In fact, there are no African American characters in this book which is enough to make me hate John Green.  There's nothing specific to Alabama in this book beyond, I think, the geographical location of the school and the fact that the author went to a similar school in Birmingham.  You can tell it's a new generation of YA author because of the presence of the most harmless blowjob depicted in this history of literature in these pages.

Luminous (2025) by Silvia Park

 Book Review

Luminous (2025)

by Silvia Park

     2025 was a down year for literary fiction neither the race for the Booker nor the National Book Award interested me- I didn't even recognize the semi-finalsts for the National Book Award.  Luminous, by first time novelist Silvia Park, stood out to me this year as an excellent combination of genre (science fiction) and literary fiction themes.  Luminous moves in a couple different directions and handle all its issues in a way that isn't overly didactic or stereotyped.    Luminous is one of the first really vivid visualizations of what a post-human society might look like- here we have characters who are part robot, part human, humans who have familial relationships with robots and robots that definitely, definitely want to be human.  At times, the literary fiction element made me feel like I was reading a contemporary I, Robot as written by Virginia Woolf, but my take is always that a difficult to read novel is interesting in a way that an easy-to-read novel simply is not.

  I'd highly, highly recommend picking up a copy of Luminous if you can find it in a book shop.

Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Crazy in Alabama (1993)

by Mark Childress

Industry, Alabama

Alabama: 9/18

   It's the half-way mark for the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  The Alabama chapter is weak, and it got me thinking how editor Susan Straight made her picks for this state, where the only sure-fire canon level pick is To Kill a Mockingbird.   I realized, walking the dog last night, that you can use the subject categories from the Library of Congress, like Alabama - fiction, to look at every title so classified, and that there was likely to be a 100% overlap.  The Alabama - fiction tag in the library of congress returns about 330 titles.  I looked through 80 of them on my walk and saw 40% of the titles from this chapter, so I think it is likely that Straight must have had the same insight.  

  Crazy in Alabama is the kind of title that would have driven me nuts as an Audiobook but was fine to read in physical form.  It's a comic novel, later turned into a film by Antonio Banderas, of all people, starring Melanie Griffith, about an abused housewife in small-town Alabama who murders his husband and escapes to Hollywood to pursue her dream as an actress.  Meanwhile, back at home her relatives deal with the consequences of her actions and their own feelings about the incipient civil rights movement.

Four Spirits (2003) by Sena Jeter Naslund

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Four Spirits (2003)

by Sena Jeter Naslund

Birmingham, Alabama

Alabama: 8/18

   I'm mention again that Northern Alabama is the biggest literary dark patch I've observed since upstate New York.  The sole exception is four novels set in Birmingham, all within six blocks of each other.  Three of the books are works of historical fiction about the Civil Rights movement, the last is set at a strangely integrated high school.  Four Spirits is a complicated mutlti-viewpoint novel that switches between white and black characters. The four spirits are the four girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15th, 1963.  Naslund is nothing if not committed to the bit, including as one of her characters a highly unconvincing Klu Klux Klan bomb maker.  The characters closer to her own experience are more believable but overall, I thought the single incident was thin source material for a book that tries to convey multiple points of view.   The chapters involving the actual Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King and his local counterparts were interesting but also reminded me of the almost total absence of political fiction in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- it's domestic fiction till the cows come home in the Deep South.

Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dessa Rose (1986)

by Sherley Anne Williams

Marengo County, Alabama

Alabama: 7/18

  Dessa Rose was a genuine surprise from the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, a transgressive work of fiction about a white plantation wife and a band of escaped slaves she shelters- set in the 1830's.  It is the first book set in the 19th century in the South which depicts a sexual relationship between a male slave and a female mistress- which- if you just kind of described the outlines of the culture in this part of the country, you would think relationships between black men and white women would be, whatever else, an interesting subject for literary fiction.  But it is not, and I think that is because, unlike relationships between white men and black women, relationships between black men and white women were punishable by immediate extrajudicial murder.

  I'd like to say that this idea is either a myth or exaggeration, but the essential truth of this situation is revealed in cases like the murder of Emmett Till, an African American murdered for allegedly cat-calling a white woman in public.  I imagine there are still parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia where a black man/white woman couple would face trouble.  The relationship depicted here is a casual one, but the utter absence of any fully developed relationships between black men and white women across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana is enough to give one pause.  Really?  Not a single novel written on the subject.  Perhaps there is a work of science fiction out there that covers such a relationship in an alternate universe. 

Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001) by Barry Hannah

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001)

by Barry Hannah

Clinton, Mississippi

Mississippi: 2/18

  Both Mississippi and Alabama scored eighteen titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  That ties them for last place in this specific chapter, behind Florida, Louisiana and Georgia.  18 titles does put them both above the single digit states of the mid-Atlantic.  I've also moved away from the original 13 colonies of the Atlantic seaboard and into the first of the hinterlands that were settled (excepting those that lay within the original 13 colonies).  Here, the dynamic was first, the clearing out/removal of the Native tribes- most of whom were property holding and "civilized" within the usage of that term at the time.  Second, it was the cotton revolution which opened up huge swaths of Alabama and especially Mississippi for enormous, slave driven cotton plantations.   The need for slaves, exhaustion of the soil in the upper south from Tobacco farming and the ban on the importation of slaves from abroad drove a huge, forced population movement, as the slave holders of the Virginias and Carolinas sold their slaves "down the river" to work on the plantations of the newer south.

   Not that Yonder Stands Your Orphan, by moderately well-known southern author Barry Hannah, addresses any of that.   Instead, Orphan is a loosely assembled collection of eccentric and violent characters living around a lake.  It's not a great book- it was the author's last novel- but it, at least, interesting, and neither a work of chick-lit or a YA title.  I will say I've never read a book where so many people were sliced open by knives.

The Saints of Swallow Hill (2022) by Donna Everheart

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Saints of Swallow Hill (2022)

by Donna Everheart

Valdosta, Georgia

Georgia: 24/24

  I started the Georgia chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America back on April 15th of this year, meaning these twenty-four titles took over seven months to knock back.  The Saints of Swallow Hill is last because it's an Audiobook, and my time spent listening to Audiobooks is way, way down this year.  Also, I thought The Saints of Swallow Hill was mostly tedious, a depression-era work of historical fiction set on a Turpentine Farm in South Georgia.   One main character is a rootless jack-of-all-trades with a penchant for banging the wife of his immediate supervisor everywhere he goes.  The other is a childless widow who is forced to flee the Carolinas after a neighbor sees the immediate aftermath of her shotgun abetted mercy killing of her sick husband.   The plot is a conventional will they or won't they romance enlivened by the Southern Georgia swamp-forest setting- not an environment with which I am familiar.

  Looking through the 24 titles representing Georgia, a handful stand out- Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, Tayari Jones and Honore Jeffers- all women.  The classics portion includes Cane and Gone With the Wind, which are both canon level American Lit.   Most of the "discoveries" were in the African American authored books- Appalache Red by Raymond Andrews was particularly memorable.   Bringing up the bottom, as always, the chick lit and YA titles.  Georgia is a solid mid-tier literary state- third in this chapter behind Florida and Louisiana, but if it had been in the prior grouping it probably would be a close second to Virginia, and maybe the number one state from that chapter.