Book Reviews

“It was a bitch growing up in Birmingham. Unless you were white. And Earl B. Peterson wasn’t white,” writes Maryville author Rhonda Lynn Rucker in her young adult novel, Welcome to Bombingham. Rucker shines a spotlight on the systemic racism and unchecked violence that plagued the black community in early 1960s Birmingham, Alabama.

In James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, a hard-drinking, hallucinating Baptist deacon known as Sportcoat shoots the ear off a notorious drug dealer in broad daylight, and an aging cop and an Italian mobster try to save Sportcoat from meeting his end in the housing projects of Red Hook Brooklyn. 

Drawn from her own family history, Louise Erdrich’s stirring new novel, The Night Watchman, unfolds around dedicated Chippewa tribal councilman Thomas Wazhushk, who enlists the help of many in his community to fight encroaching legal threat to their tribe’s survival. 

A valley covered in kudzu conceals a town’s dark secrets in Michael Farris Smith’s fifth novel, Blackwood. After two strangers arrive, unimaginable horrors begin to creep from the shadows. Smith will discuss Blackwood at Novel in Memphis on March 11.

Mary Adkins’s Privilege weaves together the stories of three young women whose lives are shaken by a sexual assault on an elite college campus. Adkins will discuss Privilege at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 10.