Sep 24
Review of What the Mountains Remember by Joy Callaway
The historical fiction story about the building of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, had a romantic element that was...
May 14
Review of Only If You're Lucky by Stacy Willingham
Only If You're Lucky centers around a group of South Carolina college students who don't truly know each other--and the unpleasant...
Jan 23
Review of The Heiress by Rachel Hawkins
The Heiress is set on a North Carolina estate that's always felt claustrophobic to Cam. But his adoptive mother Ruby, an infamous...
Oct 19, 2023
Review of Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
In Evil Eye, Etaf Rum (author of A Woman Is No Man) considers a small-town North Carolina artist, mother, and wife struggling with the...
Oct 13, 2023
Six Fantastic Novels Set in North Carolina
North Carolina Love! I love reading novels with Southern, Appalachian, and specifically North Carolina settings. Here are six I've loved...
Oct 4, 2023
Review of The Caretaker by Ron Rash
Ron Rash's newest Appalachian-set novel explores a small town shaken by upended expectations, the Korean War, and selfish rigidity that...
Aug 10, 2023
Review of Those We Thought We Knew by David Joy
David Joy's mystery, Those We Thought We Knew, set in the North Carolina mountains, explores issues of racism, corruption, generational...
Jun 8, 2023
Review of Legendborn (The Legendborn Cycle #1) by Tracy Deonn
The first in the series sets up a strong young Black heroine who bucks tradition as she explores her own heritage, flexes her newfound...
May 24, 2023
Review of Dimestore: A Writer's Life by Lee Smith
ICYMI: Smith evokes a vivid sense of the regional South in her fiction, and in this memoir she traces her Appalachian youth, offering...
Oct 1, 2021
Review of The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash
ICYMI: Wiley Cash's The Last Ballad explores race relations and the fight for dignity in a 1929 North Carolina mill camp community....
Sep 29, 2021
Review of When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash
I loved Cash's Eastern North Carolina setting, the character of Sherriff Winston Barnes, and the pulsing racial, class-based, and family...
Feb 8, 2021
Review of The Unwilling by John Hart
Hart reliably offers character-driven mysteries with heartbreaking interpersonal complications. The twists and turns here are excellent,...