Book Reviews

In Hillbilly Madonna, Sara Moore Wagner infuses her poems of Appalachian family trauma with deep compassion and an unusual focus on women’s experiences of addiction.

Rebecca Boone, wife of the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone, is front and center, fully alive and endlessly compelling, in Patricia L. Hudson’s novel Traces.

In Rainbow Rainbow, a collection of 10 stories depicting trans and queer experiences, writer Lydia Conklin deftly portrays people and relationships, revealing how both survive the despair and joy of change. Conklin will discuss the book at The Porch in Nashville on November 16.

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In her beguiling When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky, novelist Margaret Verble, a 2016 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, reimagines, for her own wily aims, the Nashville of a century ago, with allusions to Jim Crow, W.E.B. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth, and the city’s white gentry.

By carefully wielding dangerous points of view, Rebecca Bernard’s debut story collection, Our Sister Who Will Not Die, discovers a fascinating variety of ways to tell stories that push into risky terrain.

“We were responsible for one of the weirdest mysteries in American pop culture,” admits Frankie, the protagonist and narrator of Sewanee author Kevin Wilson’s latest novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic. Wilson will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 7 and SoLit’s Club Lit Fundraiser in Chattanooga on November 17.