Plain Bad Heroines

Plain Bad Heroines

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) is an unsettling read; one replete with ghosts, curses, nightmarish yellow jackets, and plenty of the uncanny. Yet, in addition to the horror—a genre Danforth clearly plays with on multiple levels in PBH—the reader meets the witty, modern narrator, with her references to social media posts and snide humor. Plain Bad Heroines explores the lives and loves of women, both contemporary and early twentieth-century, as they unapologetically make their own ways. Plain Bad Heroines, like Danforth’s first novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, is LGBTQ fiction.

She Never Told Me About the Ocean

She Never Told Me About the Ocean

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta’s She Never Told Me About the Ocean (2021) scrutinizes the experiences and emotional lives of various mothers and daughters, set on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, with a hefty dose island myth. Through a story that incorporates the everyday and the mythical, She Never Told Me About the Ocean highlights the interconnectedness of birth, death, and humanity.

Barnaby Rudge

Barnaby Rudge

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

While many have certainly heard of Dickens’ other history (A Tale of Two Cities), few know his first. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty was originally published in installments throughout 1841 and it fictionalizes the very real Gordon Riots of 1780.

NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce

NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Nuala O’Connor’s brilliant, moving, and yes, delightful, NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (2021) gives today’s readers a first-person narrative through which to meet and admire Nora Barnacle Joyce. From her own perspective, O’Connor’s Nora shares details of her life with legendary James Joyce, from courtship, to shared self-exile, parenthood, chronic illness, literary success, and, ultimately, death.

Be Holding

Be Holding

Chris Mathers Jackson
Poetry, My List of Required Reads

Rarely does a book-length poem hold its reader as tenderly and intimately as Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020) held me. I never would have thought I would encourage everyone I know to read an ode of sorts to basketball legend, Julius Erving (famously called Dr. J.), and yet here I sit, enthusiastically doing just that.

The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, My List of Required Reads

works that envision various possible experiences of enslavement and the Underground Railroad like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2017), provide modern Americans with ample food-for-thought when considering race relations, questions of reparations, and more. Whitehead’s novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and the National Book Award, provides an alternate history of slavery in the American South, not in terms of downplaying its brutality, but by exploring various means of dealing with its consequence.

Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy

Chris Mathers Jackson
Nonfiction

J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) is memoir punctuated by social commentary. Thirty-something Vance tells his life story, which, no doubt, starts out like many kids who live amidst broken families and poverty in the American Midwest. Growing up in Ohio, the grandson of Kentucky hillbillies, Vance’s memoir becomes an elegy for all the Scots-Irish of Appalachia, all the hillbillies.

The Once and Future Witches

The Once and Future Witches

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Among the notable witch-themed novels out this year is Alix E Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (2020). Harrow creates a late nineteenth-century fictional world of Crow County (think southern Appalachia) and the New Salem (one hundred miles south of the ruins of old Salem). From its opening line, magic runs through The Once and Future Witches, as three wayward sisters, whom life has separated for seven years, find themselves drawn to the same city square on the same day.

Alice Hoffman's Magical Books

Alice Hoffman's Magical Books

Chris Mathers Jackson
Reading Fun

I convened with the Owens family in Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic (1995), Rules of Magic (2017), and Magical Lessons (2020). By reading all three novels together, I enjoyed a month of magically lovable witches battling the challenges and frustrations of being independent creatures in a world that doesn’t appreciate their unconventional style or power. Hoffman’s novels build prequel upon prequel as she works closer and closer to the root of the Owens’ family story and its curse.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Chris Mathers Jackson
Reading Fun

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe serves up recipes for good living and good eats as it weaves two story lines together. It reflects upon the complicated history of a tiny Alabama town during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the struggle of one middle-aged woman’s attempts to love herself near the century’s end.

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