Alabama ties

 

The next Books & Beyond (BAB) group meeting will be Tuesday, May 21st at 6:30pm in the library’s Conference Room.  Take note that this a week earlier than the normal meeting time in an attempt to avoid abutting the Memorial Day weekend.  

This year, May is our annual author study and we will be chatting about Henry James! Listen to/read/watch anything about/by Henry James and come tell us about it!

BAB met this week to chat about books with an Alabama setting and the titles truly ran the gamut! (Book descriptions pulled from Amazon)

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

Chloe Green is so close to winning. After her moms moved her from SoCal to Alabama for high school, she’s spent the past four years dodging gossipy classmates and the puritanical administration of Willowgrove Christian Academy. The thing that’s kept her going: winning valedictorian. Her only rival: prom queen Shara Wheeler, the principal’s perfect progeny. But a month before graduation, Shara kisses Chloe and vanishes. On a furious hunt for answers, Chloe discovers she’s not the only one Shara kissed. There’s also Smith, Shara’s longtime quarterback sweetheart, and Rory, Shara’s bad boy neighbor with a crush. The three have nothing in common except Shara and the annoyingly cryptic notes she left behind, but together they must untangle Shara’s trail of clues and find her.

Midnight at the Blackbird Café by Heather Webber

Nestled in the mountain shadows of Alabama lies the little town of Wicklow. It is here that Anna Kate has returned to bury her beloved Granny Zee, owner of the Blackbird Café. It was supposed to be a quick trip to close the café and settle her grandmother’s estate, but despite her best intentions to avoid forming ties or even getting to know her father’s side of the family, Anna Kate finds herself inexplicably drawn to the quirky Southern town her mother ran away from so many years ago, and the mysterious blackbird pie everybody can’t stop talking about.

The Elementals by Michael McDowell

After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach. Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand. But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty. Inside, something deadly lies in wait. Something that has terrified Dauphin Savage and Luker McCray since they were boys and which still haunts their nightmares. Something horrific that may be responsible for several terrible and unexplained deaths years earlier - and is now ready to kill again ...

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die. Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan's demons straight to Hell. But something awful's brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up. Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?

Glass Cabin by Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel (not available in the Jeff Co. library system)

Glass Cabin chronicles the thirteen years Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel spent building their home out of secondhand tin, tornado-snapped power poles, and church glass on Hydrangea Ridge. Their alternating voices support one another like parts of their cabin-every board needs its nail, every window needs its frame. These poems explore the work it takes to measure cuts for stairs, to haul one ton of water up the mountain, and to write. It is also a meditation on hope, on frustration, and their place in the wilder parts of the world.

Big Fish by Daniel Wallace

In his prime, Edward Bloom was an extraordinary man. He could outrun anybody. He never missed a day of school. He saved lives and tamed giants. Animals loved him, people loved him, women loved him. He knew more jokes than any man alive. At least that’s what he told his son, William. But now Edward Bloom is dying, and William wants desperately to know the truth about his elusive father—this indefatigable teller of tall tales—before it’s too late. So, using the few facts he knows, William re-creates Edward’s life in a series of legends and myths, through which he begins to understand his father’s great feats, and his great failings. The result is hilarious and wrenching, tender and outrageous.

Big Fish (film)

When Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) becomes ill, his son, William (Billy Crudup), travels to be with him. William has a strained relationship with Edward because his father has always told exaggerated stories about his life, and William thinks he's never really told the truth. Even on his deathbed, Edward recounts fantastical anecdotes. When William, who is a journalist, starts to investigate his father's tales, he begins to understand the man and his penchant for storytelling. (Rottentomatoes.com)

Treeborne by Caleb Johnson

Janie Treeborne lives on an orchard at the edge of Elberta, Alabama, and in time, she has become its keeper. A place where conquistadors once walked, and where the peaches they left behind now grow, Elberta has seen fierce battles, violent storms, and frantic change―and when the town is once again threatened from without, Janie realizes it won’t withstand much more. So she tells the story of its people. Treeborne is a celebration and a reminder: of how the past gets mixed up in thoughts of the future; of how home is a story as much as a place.

The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis

From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival.  

The Amulet by Michael McDowell

When a rifle range accident leaves Dean Howell disfigured and in a vegetative state, his wife Sarah finds her dreary life in Pine Cone, Alabama made even worse. After long and tedious days on the assembly line, she returns home to care for her corpselike husband while enduring her loathsome and hateful mother-in-law, Jo. Jo blames the entire town for her son’s mishap, and when she gives a strange piece of jewelry to the man she believes most responsible, a series of gruesome deaths is set in motion. Sarah believes the amulet has something to do with the rising body count, but no one will believe her. As the inexplicable murders continue, Sarah and her friend Becca Blair have no choice but to track down the amulet themselves, before it’s too late . . .

Alabama Empire by Welbourn Kelley

Originally published in the 1950s, Alabama Empire is a fabulously rich and exciting novel of early America--and of John Fyfe, a bold young Scottish renegade whose adventures sweep him from New York's infamous debtors' prison to Alabama's exotic Creek Empire; from Dorcas Lord, the minister's daughter turned harlot, to the arms of Amalie, the passionate Scotch-French-Indian princess; from duty as General Washington's physician to the danger and excitement of being the trusted counselor of the brilliant half-breed Creek emperor, Alexander McGillivray...

The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg

In the spring of 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills of northern Alabama had come to the edge of all they had ever known. Across the South, padlocks and logging chains bound the doors of silent mills, and it seemed a miracle to blue-collar people in Jacksonville that their mill still bit, shook, and roared. The century-old hardwood floors still trembled under whirling steel, and people worked on, in a mist of white air. The mill had become almost a living thing, rewarding the hardworking and careful with the best payday they ever had, but punishing the careless and clumsy, taking a finger, a hand, more.

Open Season by Linda Howard

Daisy Minor is bored. Worse than that, she's boring. A small-town librarian, she's got a wardrobe as sexy as a dictionary and hasn't been on a date in years. She's never even had a lukewarm love affair, let alone a hot one. So when she wakes up on her thirty-fourth birthday, still living with her widowed mom and spinster aunt, she decides it's time to get a life. One makeover later, she's letting her hair down, dancing the night away at clubs, and laughing and flirting with men for the first time in, well, ever. But on her way home late one night, Daisy sees something she's not supposed to see. Suddenly the target of a killer, she's forced to put her manhunt on hold. But the very moment she stops looking might be the moment she finds what she's wanted all along. Trouble is, before he can share her life, he might just have to save it.

GENERAL DISCUSSION:

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allison

In a garden surrounded by a tall fence, tucked away behind a small, quiet house in an even smaller town, is an apple tree that is rumored to bear a very special sort of fruit. In this luminous debut novel, Sarah Addison Allen tells the story of that enchanted tree, and the extraordinary people who tend it.... A successful caterer, Claire Waverley prepares dishes made with her mystical plants. Meanwhile, her elderly cousin, Evanelle, is known for distributing unexpected gifts whose uses become uncannily clear. They are the last of the Waverleys--except for Claire's rebellious sister, Sydney, who fled Bascom the moment she could, abandoning Claire, as their own mother had years before. When Sydney suddenly returns home with a young daughter of her own, Claire's quiet life is turned upside down. 

Gone Crazy in Alabama by Rita Williams-Garcia

Coretta Scott King Award–winning, Newbery Honor, and New York Times bestselling author Rita Williams-Garcia tells the story of the Gaither sisters as they travel from the streets of Brooklyn to the rural South for the summer of a lifetime. Powerful and humorous, this companion to the award-winning One Crazy Summer and P.S.Be Eleven will be enjoyed by fans of the first two books, as well as by readers meeting these memorable sisters for the first time.

Michael McDowell

Michael McDowell (June 1, 1950 – December 27, 1999) was an American novelist and screenwriter described by author Stephen King as "the finest writer of paperback originals in America today". His best-known work is the screenplay for the Tim Burton film Beetlejuice. While arguably best known for his works of Southern Gothic horror, McDowell was an accomplished stylist who wrote several series with marked differences in tone, character, and subject matter. His period novels are praised for their intricate eye for historical research and accurate details and range from Gilded Age New York City to wiregrass Alabama in the depths of the Great Depression(Wikipedia).

Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese

When Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, he has mixed emotions. Raised by the old man he was entrusted to soon after his birth, Frank is haunted by the brief and troubling moments he has shared with his father, Eldon. When he finally travels by horseback to town, he finds Eldon on the edge of death, decimated from years of drinking. The two undertake a difficult journey into the mountainous backcountry, in search of a place for Eldon to die and be buried in the warrior way. As they travel, Eldon tells his son the story of his own life—from an impoverished childhood to combat in the Korean War and his shell-shocked return.

This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew by Daniel Wallace

If we’re lucky, we all encounter at least one person whose life elevates and inspires our own. For Daniel Wallace, that was his longtime friend and brother-in-law, William Nealy. Seemingly perfect, impossibly cool, William was James Dean, Clint Eastwood, and MacGyver all rolled into one: an acclaimed outdoorsman, a famous cartoonist, an accomplished author, a master of all he undertook. William was the ideal that Daniel sought to emulate, and the person who gave him the courage to become a writer. But when William took his own life at age forty eight, Daniel’s heartbreak led him to commit a grievous act of his own, a betrayal that took him down a path into the tortured recesses of William’s past.

The Love Song of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

The NAACP Image Award-winning poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic—an intimate yet sweeping novel with luminescence and force—that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.