The Southern Bookseller Review 11/9/25
The week of November 9, 2025
Your favorite bookstores and why you love them.
The Southern Book Prize ballot launched on November 1, and has already received over 100 responses from readers and customers of 60+ bookstores in all 11 states in SIBA’s territory.
As part of the ballot, readers are asked to name their local bookstore and say why they like to shop there. The responses, which in the past have ranged from “they have great staff” to “they carry every Star Wars book I’m looking for,” are something the people at SBR always look forward to reading. Here are a few from the first week of voting:
“They are my favorite place to go in the city that I love.” ― a customer of All Good Books in Columbia, SC
“I absolutely love the feeling when I step inside Square Books. It’s like a warm hug from a friend you want to spend hours with.” ― a customer of Square Books in Oxford, MS
“Knowledge is power! Feed the people fuel the revolution!” ― a customer of Blacksburg Books in Blacksburg, VA
“They do the best event programming!” ― a customer of Charis Books & More in Decatur, GA
“THE best. It’s like stepping in between worlds. Great service too.” ― a customer of Avid Bookshop in Athens, GA
Voting for the Southern Book Prize is open now and will run through February 1, 2026. All readers who love Southern literature and Southern independent bookstores can vote for their favorites.
See the finalists | Vote for your favorite books
Readers also have a chance to enter a raffle to receive a set of the finalist titles and a $100 gift card to their local indie bookstore or Bookshop.org. Even better, when you vote, you also have a chance to say something nice about your favorite bookstore.
Happy reading!
Featuring reviews of:
- Secret Nights and Northern Lights, reviewed by Christina Tabereaux, The Snail On the Wall in Huntsville, Alabama
- Daddy Issues by Kate Goldbeck, reviewed by Megan Bell, The Underground Bookshop LLC in Carrollton, Georgia
- Next of Kin by Gabrielle Hamilton, reviewed by Jude Burke-Lewis, Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
- I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman, reviewed by Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books in St Petersburg, Florida
- How Girls Are Made by Mindy McGinnis, reviewed by Andrea Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
- Vida by Duncan Tonatiuh, reviewed by Laura Hoefener, Bookmiser in Marietta, Georgia
- Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler, reviewed by Andrea Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
- How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks, reviewed by Fisher Nash, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky
- Bookseller Buzz: Winging It by Megan Wagner Lloyd, Michelle Mee Nutter (illus.), reviewed by Beth Seufer Buss, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Mandy Harris, Angel Wings Bookstore in Oxford, North Carolina, Barb Rascon, Page 158 Books in Wake Forest, North Carolina
The Southern Bookseller Review 11/9/25 Read More »
There are books whose urgency barely needs to be articulated because it’s so evident within the work itself, and Hunchback seemed to me like one of those: it burns itself right into the mind of the reader. It’s a cinematic work, that conjures up a dense and vivid world with very little, so the language needed a lot of honing, to make sure that it was hitting all of those imagistic notes in the way that they needed to. I’d say the principal narrative voice came to me quite quickly and intuitively, but there are lots of shifts of register within the span of the book, which took quite a lot of time and attention to capture. ”
What I really enjoy about writing love stories is the little moments that feel just as important as the big love declarations. I think it’s the acts of service, the little thoughtful things that each character will do for the other. In each of my books, there’s a moment that I can narrow down to, of consideration and thoughtfulness in a physical, tangible way. The way that Bo [Out on a Limb] goes about splitting their expenses. It’s not a grand declaration of love, but it’s respect, and it’s an understanding and communication, and it’s showing somebody who is really capable of having awkward conversations when wanting to take care of somebody. And wanting to look after someone with respect in mind. Or like Caleb in Out of the Woods, when Sarah is upset because they’re going camping and they don’t have any electricity. She doesn’t bring her Kindle, but he brings it, and he buys her a solar charger. It’s this little way of like letting someone know that they’re seen and their past influences matter
I’ve always been a writer who puts character first, and when I embarked on writing this novel, I was prepared for some deep character dives. But Buckeye is larger in scope and size than anything I’d ever attempted, and I had no idea of the depths that awaited me… What I learned–what I keep learning, as a writer–is that when you bring a lot of characters together, a story emerges, and it’s not always the story you thought you were going to write.
When it comes to emotionality in the book, I wanted to portray how — this goes along with the ambiguity — multiple contradictory feelings can exist simultaneously within one person, and how our feelings may change over the day, over an hour, and over a year and a lifetime. Even the simplest things can be the hardest to say. For example, Bo really wants to tell Hans how proud he is. He tries to say it throughout the whole book. It was super frustrating to write. “Come on, Bo! You can do it!” It’s a simple and good emotion, right? You think that it should be easy, but a lifetime of normative training combined with the recurring conflicting aspects of the relationship get in the way. And in this sense, I was very inspired by my own father and grandfather. My grandfather told me how proud he was of my father and how well he’d done in life and so on, but he couldn’t tell my father that. But of course I did, and it made my dad happy. But there’s something that makes certain feelings really hard to express.
There are many examples of this kind of thing throughout history. I was actually inspired by a specific historical event; I came across the true story of a village in Oxfordshire in the 1700s in which a great rumor was said to be spreading that five sisters had been “seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs.” I was obviously fascinated to imagine how the girls’ community would have responded to their case, and how this rumor spreading might easily have become dangerous and even violent…I agree [that the] incredibly sinister aspect of Shirley Jackson’s work, the vilification of the mundane…is definitely terrain that The Hounding shares with Jackson’s stories. Like her, I’m very interested in thinking about the everyday awfulness of people, but I also wanted to try to understand even my most detestable characters. I really wanted to find a degree of sympathy for all of them in order to inhabit their thoughts and feelings.
They were such extraordinarily different people in the way they related to the world and other people. He was this awkward and lonely man before he met her, living quite a dislocated life, and she was this livewire and such a compelling, energetic, positive presence. [There’s] something about how a marriage like that works, then putting that marriage in this extreme scenario, to the ultimate test.
