Book Review: Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson

 

Arlene Fleet was born in Possett, Alabama. She lived with her mentally ill mother in her Aunt Florence and Uncle Bruster's house and shared a room with her cousin, Clarice. High school has its ups and downs and life is generally predictable until one night when a date goes horribly wrong. That's when Arlene began wearing all black, and she stopped playing hard to get with the boys. That might not have worried anyone but Arlene's family, but the disappearance of Jim Beverly, star of the football team, throws the whole town into an uproar.

After graduation, Arlene flees to Chicago, leaving Possett behind her. Ten years later, she's got several degrees under her belt and she's working as a teacher in a local college. She's madly in love with Burr, a tax lawyer, but she hasn't been able to fully commit to him because of the trauma she still carries with her. Burr has been more than patient with Arlene—who he calls Lena—and he wants to marry her, but he's handed down an ultimatum. He wants to be introduced to her family or he's gone. When she gets news that her Uncle Bruster is retiring, she knows she'll be expected to show up. She can't imagine taking Burr, who is African American, and placing him in front of her incredibly racist family, but she can't imagine losing him, either.

Lena decides she needs to go and face what made her run away a decade ago. She finds that Clarice married her high school sweetheart. She's a mom to three kids and is every bit as sweet and kind as she was before Lena left. Lena's mom's mental and physical health have continued to decline, and the woman has a knack for stealing meds and helping herself to pills. Her aunt and uncle are much the same as they were ten years ago—at least that's what Lena thinks at first. But things aren't entirely as they might seem at first glance. Things that happened in Possett—the things Lena ran away from—are far from being settled, but she'll have to come to terms with all of it before she can leave again.

I loved the mystery in this novel. Jackson's narrative is sarcastic and funny while being serious and sincere at the same time. There are surprises peppered throughout, and the ending … This title was published twenty-one years ago. I've read her latest, which came out just this year. I'm not sure how I missed this one, but I'm happy to have gotten to experience it. This was definitely a five-star read for me without question. 

Book Review: Mr. Winterbourne by Clara van Houten

 

Debra Cowdry keeps all the rejection letters from literary agents and publishing houses in one specific drawer in her apartment. She works in a law office as a typist, and on her lunch breaks, she often sits at her favorite bookshop. The window display and all the tables are decorated with books written by men. Bestsellers with glossy covers, and a woman's name on only a few of them. When her best friend, Sheila, jokes and says she should send in her manuscript under a male pen name, Debra takes it to heart. What kind of response might her book get if she were to do this?

She receives a letter back from an agent, and when Lisa, the agent's assistant, lets Debra into the room, an unexpected thing happens. The book is picked up by a publishing house with Alec Winterbourne as the author. There are only three people who know Alec Winterbourne isn't a real person. They keep her secret, and Debra publishes more books under this pen name.

Then Debra meets a man named Alec Winterbourne. He's an architect, and he's funny and charming. He's handsome and smart, and in no time at all, Debra has fallen in love with him. When she writes a book that garners a lot of attention, requests for interviews start pouring in. She and Lisa, who has stepped in as her agent, let Alec in on Debra's secret. He begins filling in for Debra, pretending to be the person who wrote her books. Things work—sometimes smoothly, sometimes less so—until they don't.

This was a very entertaining read based on a very interesting premise. I wasn't sure why Lisa—the assistant turned agent—couldn't help Debra when things turned sideways, but maybe there were reasons I didn't have figured out. There were a couple of twists that surprised me. This was very different from van Houten's Everything He Never Told Me, but every bit as engaging.

I gave this book four stars. This title releases on October 6, 2026.

Book Review: The Things You'll Never Know by Ashley Audrain

 

This book is about the weekend Fiona died.

Adam takes their daughter, Astrid, camping for the weekend. Fiona stays home with their precocious six-year-old son, Pepper. She's hoping for a reset. She's hoping she can take this short time to get her head straight again. But when Adam and Astrid arrive home, Fiona is lying on the floor wearing a coat that doesn't belong to her. How long has she been there? What happened, and what did Pepper see? Pepper doesn't have much of a story to tell. You wouldn't expect Fiona to say anything at all, but you'd be wrong. Fiona is the biggest narrator of this tale.

This is a heavy story. There is nothing light here from beginning to end. It's about Fiona; how she sees herself, how she's been seen by her mother, her sister, and her best friend, Leah. It's about how her husband and children see her. The timeline changes throughout, and we see things from different points of view. There are mysteries upon mysteries, and revelations that slowly stitch things into a history that makes sense. It's twisty, and surprising, and I never saw that ending coming. I finished this book several days ago and I'm still thinking about it, so I think it deserves all five stars.

This title releases on January 12, 2027.

Book Review: Until the Next Letter by Hannah Claire

When Rachel and Libby's mom passes away, they are heartbroken. They find a letter that she wrote and left for them, then realize it's the first letter of five. With each letter they read, they learn more about their mother's past, and they uncover some heavy secrets that neither one of them ever suspected.

I'll be honest, I struggled with Linda, the mother who died, a little bit. The girls uncover so many things they had no idea about, and in many instances, I felt as though it would have been much better for her to have just had a conversation with her daughters.  By coming clean after her death, she released herself of the outcome of all the truths the siblings were flooded with. She didn't have to deal with the aftermath of what she had revealed. She didn't have to watch her children come to terms with a new reality because of secrets she'd kept from them.

Still, there's no denying that this is a very sweet novel. It's filled with a lot of love, and the idea that families can be made in a million different ways. Libby was a very likable character. I wasn't sure about Rachel at first, but I grew to like her in short order. The relationship between the siblings, while not terrible to begin with, really bloomed while they took these letters one at a time and fulfilled their mother's wishes. There's romance here, too, and I really liked the obvious love Rachel's husband, Ivan, has for his wife.

This book kept me intrigued throughout. Ms. Claire did a wonderful job of creating characters readers could connect with. I gave this novel four stars. I would recommend this read and am happy I came across it myself.

Why Do I Write So Many Book Reviews???

I've always been a reader. Books are pretty much the first things I can remember about my life. Dr. Seuss was a big deal. I remember the ABC Book. It was white. The A was red, the B was green and the C was blue. There were three strange creatures playing around the letters, and I loved that book. Big A, little A, what begins with a? Aunt Annie's alligator. A … a … A. Perhaps my favorite was Big M, little M … Many mumbling mice are making midnight music in the moonlight ... mighty nice.

It wasn't just the ABC Book. My childhood library was filled with Dr. Seuss, including Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and the crazy tongue twister that is Fox in Socks. One of my most beloved childhood books was The Monster at the End of This Book. Grover. Who doesn't love Grover?

I was an only child for some time. I remember being read to, but I also had to entertain myself a lot. One of the things I liked doing was pulling out my clunky hard plastic turntable—the cover was a boring beige color—and sifting through my collection of Disney Read-Alongs. 

"This is a Disneyland original Little Long-Playing Record, and I am your story reader. I am going to begin now to read the story of [insert title here]. You can read along with me in your book. You will know it's time to turn the page when Tinker Bell rings her little bells like this: (sound of 'chimes' ringing). Let's begin now."

I remember having Cinderella, Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Pete's Dragon, and my favorite, Alice in Wonderland. I had such a love affair with this story that I wanted an Alice themed cake for my fifth birthday.

Then I went to school and was introduced to the Bookmobile and the Scholastic Book Fair. Oh, my goodness, the Bookmobile. This was a really big deal for my little book loving heart. My mom would tuck a ten-dollar bill in my pocket, and when I stepped inside that big bus, I was in heaven. I would study all the photos of all the books and stickers coloring the newsprint sheets that were handed out in school from Scholastic. I remember getting those every few months, and I would take my money into my teacher and couldn't wait for her to pull out the great big box weeks later and hand out all the goodies my classmates and I ordered.

Books. Seriously. Is there anything better than books?

I read a lot, but I also wrote. In middle school, I began writing short stories and poetry. I asked for a typewriter one Christmas. You could buy little plastic discs that gave you different fonts. I had the standard type font, but I could switch it to italics. That was cool, but you could also buy typewriter ribbon in different colors.

What? I could type poetry in blue italics! My life was complete! 

Then I wrote my first book. Before I'd even finished it, it was well over 600 pages. I began trying to shop it around to publishing houses. This was in the late 90s, and I didn't have tools at my disposal like the internet. I spent hours sitting in the library scribbling down names and addresses of houses that might be interested in my very long family drama. Because the books that had this information in them were in the research section, I was not allowed to check them out. This is what we call determination.

I wrote so many query letters, and many houses requested I send ten pages, a chapter, the first three chapters. And so, I printed what was requested, and I spent money in postage to send it to them. I got a lot of responses back. No one wanted to publish the book, but one literary agent who read it gave me a lot of very helpful feedback. To this day, I'm grateful for what he wrote to me. (Mark Sullivan, you are awesome. Thank you!) I had a stack of rejection letters and to be honest, it took the wind out of my sails. I didn't finish the book. I wound up putting the project to the side after my husband and I had our first child. And then we had child number two. We'd always planned to homeschool, so I jumped into that with both feet. I made myself a promise that I would finish the book someday, and even if it never got published, at least I could say I completed it. I could say I wrote a book.

The list of authors I enjoyed reading was long. In my freshman year of high school, an English teacher I absolutely loved had us read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I was blown away by this book. I loved it so much that for a long time, I reread it yearly. Then, when life happened, and things got rough, I would pull it out again, and reading it consoled me. It's still my favorite book of all time. I also loved reading books written by Dean Koontz. (How many of you read Watchers?) I've never really been a fan of horror novels, but there were a lot of Stephen King books that I loved, too. (Delores Claiborne for example.) I loved mysteries and thrillers and read the Inspector Lynley series by Elizabeth George, the Kay Scarpetta books by Patricia Cornwell, the goofy Stephanie Plum books written by Janet Evanovich, and the magic realism of Sarah Addison Allen's books. James Lee Burke. Wow. I absolutely love the way James Lee Burke writes, and Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. I was reading V.C. Andrews at thirteen—yikes, but I certainly wasn't the only tween reading those books—and then there was Judy Blume. Thank God for Judy Blume. There's so many. I'll stop here, but I could keep going. Like I said before, there's nothing better than books. 

When I took on the gigantic responsibility of educating two children, I continued to read, but it was instructive books that sat on my nightstand instead of the latest Michael Crichton. I learned how to build a curriculum that suited the county we happened to live in at the time, and I even took a job with a small publication called Kids 411. I became a homeschool liaison, writing articles and sharing with other parents all the information I had gathered about being a homeschool family. (This was in 2003, and Colorado was not a big homeschool state at that time. Maya had a lot of friends she danced and did gymnastics with, and none of them were homeschooled. I was largely on my own, and I was okay with that. I was good at homeschooling. I absolutely loved being a homeschool mom.)

For many years, the authors I read came from a very different list. Sandra Boynton, Eric Carle, Audrey Wood and Laura Joffe Numeroff. I read Mary Pope Osborne, Marcus Pfister, E.B. White, C.S. Lewis and Jane Yolen. I read Room on the Broom, Sheep in a Jeep, The Mermaid's Baby, Goodnight Moon and Chrysanthemum. The kids and I would go to the library at least twice a week. They didn't have a cap on how many books could be checked out, and neither did I. I read at least four books to them at bedtime every single night. We took books with us everywhere we went just in case there was time during errands or long car rides when they got bored. I read a whole lot of books from the back seat of many cars. Children's books. They are magical.

When our oldest was about twelve, I finally finished writing that first novel. (The finished version was nowhere near 600 pages by the way.) This time, I didn't try to sell it, I published it on my own. I went through a publisher called Xlibris. They taught me a lot, but they charged a great deal of money to do so. If I had to do it over again, I would not have gone this route, but it did make it possible for me to decide to publish and then be published. That was at the end of 2012. I learned a lot that next year about the ins and outs of having a book on the market. This was when I found out how important the almighty review is.

Let me blunt. Reviews are everything. Every author needs them, and they are so very difficult to get. Sites like Amazon advertise books with a lot of reviews, and literary agents and publishing houses look at the number of reviews to gauge how popular—and how financially profitable—a certain title might become. I repeat: REVIEWS ARE EVERYTHING.

As a new author, I had no reviews. I did know how to research, though, and I found a review group on Goodreads. It turned out to be a great group. Books were grouped according to genre, and each reviewing period lasted about two months. In order to get four reviews, you had to be willing to read four books and write and post four reviews. None of the reviews were reciprocal, so I was never asked to review a book by an author who had written a review for me. There was never any crossover. They were honest reviews. (I did this for my first two books, and some of the reviews I received were awful—but they were helpful. I'd rather have an honest review and be able to learn from it than to be told a book is fantastic when it isn't.) I was part of this group for about two years, and I met a lot of great authors. I also got to read many amazing—and some not so amazing—books. I'm not in the group any longer, but it still exists thirteen years after I first discovered it.

There are a lot of authors publishing books. Some of them are traditionally published. Some of them are attached to smaller publishing houses, and some of them—like mine—are published by indie authors. The one thing every single one of these books has in common is that they all need reviews. 

I decided that if I was going to ask for reviews, I was going to write reviews.

One of the reviews I wrote that garnered the most attention was for Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell. I never write a review hoping someone will comment on it. In fact, at the time, I didn't realize that was a thing, so the response it got took me by surprise. This book is number twelve in the Kay Scarpetta series. I had been an avid reader of this series, until I got to the twelfth book. She chose to do something with her characters that didn't sit well with me, and I was hesitant to read further. I felt guilty about this. I'd been loyal to this writer and this series, but I was struggling with it all. I decided to look at some of the reviews about this book to see what other readers were saying about it—and I was horrified by some of the things I saw.

People, specifically when they have any amount of anonymity, can be incredibly mean and rude. That's not something I believe in. I don't write mean reviews. Does this mean I give four and five stars to every book I read? Absolutely not. Does this mean there haven't been books I chose to skim quickly instead of actually reading because I found no interest in them? Nope. I won't say I thought a book was good if I didn't think it was. But I always find something I liked about a book—perhaps the author's humor, maybe a phrase or two stood out, maybe it was a character, or the premise of the story—it could be something really small, and I'll be sure to write about it. I'll say the book didn't work for me, but that I'm sure there are others who will feel differently. You can say you didn't care for something without being a jerk about it. There were a lot of people being jerks about Blow Fly.

I revisited the Kay Scarpetta series. I reread all the books, including book twelve. I'll be honest—it still hit me the same way it did the first time I read it. I sat and put my thoughts and feelings down—not just about the book, but about the other reviews it had received. I think it would be really amazing if Patricia Cornwell stumbled across my review one day. I'd love to know what she thought of it. 

I write reviews because authors need reviews. I write reviews because I, as an author, desperately need reviews. One of the cool things about it is, by sitting down and putting your ideas about a book into a single sentence or several paragraphs, you're challenging your brain to write in a different way. It's not storytelling. It's a different kind of practice. The more you write, the better you become at it. Writing reviews is a great tool for an author.

You don't have to do anything special to leave a review for an author. You read a book, you jot a few ideas about what you liked and what you didn't about the book. You may not hear a thank you, but I can guarantee that author will be grateful. Authors oftentimes pay companies to help them find people who will read their books and leave reviews. I do. I go through Booksprout. I pay a fee every year to have books listed on that site, and I offer them to readers free of charge in return for honest reviews. It doesn't cost a reader anything to have an account with Booksprout. They get free books, the author gets reviews. It's a win/win. 

There are other companies that do this as well. At the beginning of 2026, I decided I was going to start reading for NetGalley. I look for specific authors, and a lot of my favorites use NetGalley. One of the things I've come to enjoy most about reading for them, though, is finding authors that are new to me, or authors who have just written their first book. It's so cool to stumble across so many brilliant novels that I otherwise would have never found. An author I know decided to use BookSirens to help her get reviews a couple of months ago. I joined to support her, but once I was a member, I just decided to keep reading for other authors on the site. I couldn't possibly name all the companies who offer books for reviews, but I know it wouldn't take much research for anyone to find them.

Honestly, logging into NetGalley or BookSirens today gives me a similar feeling to stepping up into the Bookmobile or looking through the flyers from Scholastic back in elementary school. Do you know how many books there are just waiting to be read??? It's almost more than I can fathom. 

I read on average about three to four books a month, and I review every one of them. When I brought this blog back to life, I decided I would use it to help get the word out on the books I've been able to review. I post them on my Facebook page, as well as on Instagram. Readers are everywhere. Perhaps this post will urge one or two of them to go and find one of my books and leave a review for me. :)