Fiction

To review a book with Jane Austen at its heart is, for a passionate Austen fan, a risky endeavor. The subject is powerfully attractive, but the risk of disappointment is huge: few writers have the requisite respect and skill to follow in Austen’s footsteps. In Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart, Nashville resident Beth Pattillo passes the test with a romance that will appeal to non-Austenites, as well. Pattillo appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on February 11 at 7 p.m.

Amy Greene has not written a typical debut novel. Instead, she has turned out nothing less than an epic—a story of madness and magic that spans four generations, an emotionally tangled tale that requires six disparate voices to tell and offers no easy resolutions to the conflicts of the heart. To its everlasting credit, Bloodroot is a big, ambitious book that will never be taught in a ninth-grade English class. Amy Greene will read from it at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on February 8 at 7 p.m., and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on February 9 at 6 p.m.

Wench, a story of enslaved concubines and their white male masters, is a surefooted and engrossing work of historical fiction. While debut novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez grounds her story in compelling nineteenth-century research, the book finds its center and momentum not in reams of facts but in one woman’s impossibly conflicted heart. Deeply interior and elegantly written, this novel reveals shades of emotional complexity in the slave-owner relationship, one often portrayed as a classic battle of good and evil, heroes and villains.

In her newest story collection, Homicide Survivors Picnic, Lorraine M. López writes, “There are some things we just can’t help.” Things like dead birds. Ex-husbands. Poor choices. Bad cats. It’s no picnic for many of her finely drawn characters to clean up the messes others have fecklessly abandoned. López, who teaches creative writing and literature at Vanderbilt University, is the recipient of numerous Latino awards for her writing, but this collection defies boundaries of skin color, ancestry, and gender, elevating mundane events and predicaments to the scope of larger human dramas.