Book Reviews

This Ditch-Walking Love by James Braziel Livingston Press: The University of West Alabama, 2021 Hardcover: $29.95; Paperback: $19.95 Genre: Contemporary Fiction Review by Edward Journey James Braziel’s This Ditch-Walking Love is an impressionistic collection of short stories and sketches exploring themes of strife and defeat in rural Alabama, near the Locust Fork. The location is described as “not a county of rivers – just rills and rivulets that widen into creeks.” Some stories in the collection are hypnotic collages of time, [...]

Searching for Jimmy Page by Christy Alexander Hallberg Livingston Press: The University of West Alabama, 2021 Paperback: $18.95 Genre: Fiction Review by Frye Gaillard With her new novel, Searching for Jimmy Page, Christy Alexander Hallberg takes her place as one of the bright new stars in Southern fiction. She has given us a coming-of-age story based on a premise that could have fallen anywhere between sad cliché and literary page turner. In Hallberg’s deft and confident hands, it is most assuredly [...]

Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo W.W. Norton, 2021 Hardcover: $25.00 Genre: Nonfiction; Memoir Review by Pam Kingsbury Joy Harjo’s Poet Warrior is a graduate course in what it means to find healing through poetry, as well as to live as a compassionate human. Describing herself as “being equally left and right-brained," Joy Harjo has made her life’s work as a writer and a teacher, as well as a daughter, mother, grandmother, and now matriarch, taking up the ideals of poetic justice, [...]

The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and his People, Lost and Found by Rick Bragg Knopf, 2021 Hardcover: $26.00 Genre: Nonfiction; Memoir Review by Tucker Coombe The opening of Rick Bragg’s new memoir depicts a gorgeous, luxuriant landscape—“tangled pines and mountain pasture, fractured by dappled sunlight…blue jays, yellowhammers, and an emerald blur of hummingbirds”—that provides a stunning, if unlikely, backdrop for the author’s own desolation. The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and his People, Lost and Found opens in the autumn of 2017. [...]