The Story They Long For
Mary Dixie Carter’s suspense-filled debut thriller, The Photographer, places us in the mind and world of a successful New York City photographer named Delta Dawn.
Book Reviews
Painful Honesty
Chattanooga-born R. Marie Griffith, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in the history of American religion, mines the depths of America’s past, arguing that our beloved national timeline is intertwined with — and often defined by — past injustices toward women, people of color, and immigrants, sins that continue to haunt us today.
A Pretty Place to Die
Few writers today can boast of a body of work as wide-ranging and virtuosic as Chris Offutt’s. His novels and short stories bend genre and upend expectations. The Killing Hills is no exception: A taut, gripping thriller, it also draws us deep into the lives of its troubled characters with wit and compassion. Chris Offutt will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Novel in Memphis on June 17.
Feeling No but Saying Yes
Luna Howls at the Moon is Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s third middle-grade novel to feature a service dog as protagonist and narrator, a charming device that works well in this case to illustrate the value of pairing therapy animals with troubled children. Tubb will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 15.
Poor, Forked Animals
In The Speaking Stone, a collection of essays, Michael Griffith ambles among the gravestones of a Cincinnati cemetery to track the subtle ways history intersects with individuals. He reminds us, in light-hearted prose, that pride and ambition lead inexorably to oblivion.
All Kinds of Missing, All Kinds of Loss
In Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea, Ashley Herring Blake continues to confront the hard subjects of trauma and loss, identity and community, forgiveness and redemption — subjects she sensitively explored in her previous books for middle grade and YA readers. That she does so within the context of a magical beach-themed mermaid mystery can only be a plus for her young readers.
