Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward

Golden Prey - John Sandford

Natchez burning - Greg Iles

Sycamore Row - John Grisham

Sycamore Row - Grisham, John

Summary: When wealthy Seth Hubbard hangs himself from a sycamore tree and leaves his fortune to his black maid, Jake Brigance once again finds himself embroiled in a controversial trial that will expose old racial tensions and force Ford County to confront its tortured history.



Publishers Weekly Reviews
Leave it to Grisham to make a battle about wills nail-bitingly suspenseful in his second novel featuring lawyer Jake Brigance, the hero of Grisham's debut, A Time to Kill. It's 1988, and Seth Hubbard, an elderly man dying of cancer, hangs himself after leaving detailed instructions for his funeral—and a handwritten will, penned the day before, that disinherits his children and gives 90% of his estate to his African-American caretaker, Lettie Lang. Since that unwitnessed document contradicts an earlier one, and Hubbard's assets are north of $20 million, Brigance, who was asked by Hubbard in a note to represent his interests, has a battle on his hands when the disinherited lawyer up. The storyline takes several dramatic turns, even as why Hubbard was so generous to Lang, whom he was not close to, remains a mystery. All the author's strengths are in evidence—his capturing the rhythms of small-town life in Clanton, Miss., his skill at making legal minutiae comprehensible, and his gift at getting readers to care about his characters.

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Freedom summer - Susan Goldman Rubin

Freedom summer: the 1964 struggle for civil rights in Mississippi - Susan Goldman Rubin

Summary: Offers an account of the civil rights crusade in Mississippi fifty years ago that brought on shocking violence and the beginning of a new political order.


Kirkus Reviews
In time for the 50th anniversary of the pivotal civil rights event, Rubin presents heroes, villains and everyday people in 1964 Mississippi. Freedom schools, voter-registration drives and murders drew national attention to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer, and actions there affected the civil rights movement elsewhere, all culminating in the Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. The number of eligible black voters rose from 6.4 percent prior to Freedom Summer to 60 percent by the end of 1966. Two threads weave through Rubin's narrative—a detailed story of the murders of civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman and a less focused, anecdotal picture of freedom schools and voter registration, drawing on extensive personal interviews. Though archival material and many photographs are included, too many pages of dense text are unrelieved by visuals. The extensive research is well-documented, and young readers may find much of interest in the websites recommended. Overall, the account is accessible and passionate, taking the events of that violent summer into the present, when, in 2005, 80-year-old, wheelchair-bound Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of the murders of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman and sentenced to three 20-year jail terms. A fascinating treatment of a key civil rights moment. (Nonfiction. 10-14) Copyright Kirkus 2014 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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Mudbound: a novel - Hillary Jordan

Mudbound: a novel - Jordan, Hillary

Summary: In 1946, Laura McAllan tries to adjust after moving with her husband and two children to an isolated cotton farm in the Mississipi Delta. - (Baker & Taylor)




Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* "When I think of the farm, I think of mud," says Laura, the main character in this sophisticated, complex first novel. Jordan sets her narrative in the rural Mississippi Delta in the immediate post–World War II period. Thematically, the novel charts the evolution of a wifely role—the evolution of Laura's new life—when she marries at a relatively late age and moves from her comfortable existence in Memphis (her father was a professor and she an English teacher in a private school) to a rough Delta farm when her new husband decides to forgo his engineering profession to live out his dream of cultivating the soil. The narrative is told in alternating first-person accounts (each voice rendered distinctive and authentic to the character), as Laura, her plain and steady husband, her dashing brother-in-law, and other individuals now significant in Laura's new life (one of whom is the returned GI-son of their black tenant farmer) tell their sides of the devolving events in Laura and her husband's move to this remote and rigid environment. In addition to the material deprivation Laura must endure, racism in the area is full-blown and horrible, most apparent in the face of her father-in-law, who has come to live with Laura and her husband. When her brother-in-law returns from his postwar wanderings about Europe, at first he brings a bright, new light to shine on Laura. She falls in love with him, but, ultimately, the light illuminates only ugliness. Copyright 2007 Booklist Reviews.

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