Book Reviews

A widow welcomes home her drug-addicted son after the demise of his rock band. A single mother tries to talk her son out of dressing up for Halloween as his dead brother. A chain-smoking priest attempts to cure an altar boy who faints during Communion. With the stories in Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, Sewanee fiction writer Kevin Wilson continues his tragicomic exploration of the dark side of domesticity.

William Gay’s writing doesn’t capture Middle Tennessee; it is Middle Tennessee, as much a part of the landscape as its fields and barns and creeks. Every turn of phrase, every scene describes with effortless perfection the curve of a hill, the angle of an eave, the lilt in a drawl.

Beatriz Williams’s The Summer Wives follows a young woman’s long entanglement with an insular island community and its coded world of secrets, gossip, and cross-cultural tensions. Williams will discuss The Summer Wives at Novel in Memphis on July 15.

There are few unsavory aspects of modern life that Kingsport native Kimberly Belle doesn’t weave into Three Days Missing, a thriller that tells the heart-racing story of an eight-year-old boy gone missing. Belle will appear at Allandale Mansion in Kingsport on June 26 and at Novel in Memphis on July 9.