What are Category Novels? They’re fictional tales that I’ve grouped together to help my blog-followers zero in on their preferences. A category might be based on
locale: Irish Novels, New York Novels, Southern Novels, for example
time period: Contemporary Novels, Futurist Novels, Historical Novels
characters: Family Sagas, Immigrant Stories
a sub-genre: Chick Lit, Mysteries, Road-Trip Novels
Most novels fall into more than one of my categories. (To see all of them, on a desktop computer, scroll down and to the right to find the Archive of Book Reviews. On a mobile device, scroll way down.)
My category Southern Novels includes some of my all-time favorite books. Click on the titles below to see full reviews.
News of the World Paulette Jiles (2016) In post-Civil-War Texas, a traveling performer agrees to make a dangerous journey to deliver an orphan to her aunt and uncle. (The film, with Tom Hanks, is also terrific.)
Where the Crawdads Sing Delia Owens (2018) The Marsh Girl roams the lush swamps of coastal North Carolina and meets both friends and foes. Evocative nature prose and a devilish mystery.
Watershed Mark Barr (2019) In 1930s rural western Tennessee, an impoverished agrarian community is confronted with technology that will profoundly change lives.
Heart of Palm Laura Lee Smith (2013) A family tale populated with gun-totin’, hard-lovin’, rip-roarin’ Southerners—plus deftly developed story lines.
And here is a very recent Southern Novel that I’ve read.
The Caretaker Ron Rash (2023)
Jacob and Naomi Hampton have married against the wishes of Jacob’s well-off parents, who have disinherited him, and Naomi is pregnant when Jacob is drafted to serve in the Korean War. “Caretaker” has double meaning in this superb novel, set mainly in North Carolina. Blackburn Gant is the caretaker for the local cemetery in the small town of Blowing Rock, and he’s also watching out for Naomi while Jacob, his best friend, is off soldiering. The plot gets very thorny when Jacob is wounded in Korea. Novelist Ron Rash, writing in the tradition of John Steinbeck and Carson McCullers, makes you worry about all sorts of terrible denouements, and he adds enough mildly macabre elements to qualify this novel as Southern Gothic. The characters are skillfully drawn, and the language shines with beauty in its spareness.