Book Reviews

Life moves rapidly in the 21st century, but Arwen Donahue invites readers to slow down and consider the small moments in Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year.

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.