The Southern Bookseller Review 8/19/25
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The week of August 19, 2025 A Bookstore Romance Day Reading List  "We read to know that we are not alone." ―C.S. Lewis For the readers who have been wondering about the plethora of reviews of romance books in the last few SBR editions, that is because this month is host to a little-known but much-loved holiday, Bookstore Romance Day! It is celebrated in August (this year it was on August 9) and is a chance to show some love for independent bookstores across the country who love to a good love story. Here are just a few of the romance books indie booksellers are swooning over: If Looks Could Kill by Julie Berry A First Time for Everything (Deluxe Edition) by K. L. Walther The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy by Roan Parrish Pucking Strong by Emily Rath The Second Death of Locke by V. L. Bovalino Read This Now | Read This Next | Book Buzz | The Bookseller Directory |
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Read This Now! Recommended by Southern indies… |
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Overruled by Lana Ferguson Fiction, Romance, Workplace She just keeps getting better. Oh my word! This book was exquisite. Listen, we can talk about how Dani is a wonderful female main character, strong but still fragile. We can talk about the hilarious banter and sizzling chemistry. But what makes this book amazing is the one and only Ezra freaking Hart. He has stolen my heart with his charm, his sensitivity, and just overall deliciousness. He is one of the best main male characters I have ever read, and at this point in time no one will take his crown. In true Lana Ferguson style, this book had me laughing, blushing and screaming from literally page one. Reviewed by Mekhala Villegas-Rogers, Tombolo Books in St Petersburg, Florida |
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An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park Adult Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories (single author) One thing I’ve learned from his first two books: Ed Park’s up to something. Just what it is, well that’s for the reader to stumble upon and, for me at least, love every bungling minute of. Just like the Mississippi River appears still on the surface, blanketing torrents that swallow swimmers and spit them out 25 miles downriver, don’t be fooled by his simplistic jokey style (and also kick your shoes off if you fall overboard). He’s up to something. Often oddly self-referential, often levelheadedly off-kilter, often softened by its own bite, these humorous shorts will come back to you the next day to make you say “hey, wait… ha.” Reviewed by Ian McCord, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia |
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Forget Me Not by Stacy Willingham Adult Fiction, Crime, Fiction, Thrillers Stacy Willingham has done it again, she seems to never fail to write a great thriller mystery that will keep you guessing until the end. This one intertwines the past of the main characters parents generation, then her sister who was murdered 20 years prior to the story and then the main character Claire. Claire seems to be following right in the footsteps of her big sister as she returns home to help her mom but then finds herself working at a vineyard, the same one her sister worked at. There are definitely a lot of secrets hiding at this farm and her career as a journalist has her wanting to uncover them. The diary she found tucked away in her cabin seems to be the key to solving everything but the more she learns the more she should turn around and run, but she doesn’t. Super bingeable and you will be wondering how often history repeats itself in real life. Reviewed by Kelli Dynia, Copperfish Books in Punta Gorda, Florida |
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Bookseller Buzz |
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When Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén
― Lisa Ridzén, Interview, Bookweb, Indies Introduce When Cranes Fly South Lisa Ridzén, Alice Menzies (trans) 
Lisa Ridzén is a doctoral student in sociology, researching masculinity norms in the rural communities of the Swedish far north, where she herself was raised and now lives in a small village outside of Östersund. The idea for her debut novel came from the discovery of notes her grandfather’s care team had left the family as he neared the end of his life. Alice Menzies holds a master of arts in Translation Theory and Practice from University College London, specializing in the Scandinavian languages. Her translations include works by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Fredrik Backman, Tove Alsterdal and Jens Liljestrand. She lives in London. |
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.
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This Happened to Me by Kate Price Adult Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Memoirs Price is getting comparisons to Jeannette Walls and Tara Westover, and they are so deserved! Her therapy journey is featured in the bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, and is an unflinching tale of overcoming repressed childhood trauma and breaking cycles of abuse. It has some tough parts, but Price is honest and open. Her story of growth will inspire you. Reviewed by Andrea Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia |
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Legendary Frybread Drive-In by Cynthia Leitich Smith Collections & Anthologies, Short Stories, Young Adult Fiction I loved this collection of intertribal stories that center on Sandy June’s Legendary Frybread Drive-in. Sandy June’s exists where and when it is needed. Sandy June’s is a gathering place for Indians across the country to find comfort, community, hope, and acceptance. You find it in your time of need: are you lonely or grieving? Want to help a friend? Need to forgive? Or build your confidence? In love? Sandy June’s is a comforting place to gain solace and understanding, and the perfect place to hang out with friends and family. Each story is written by a different author, but some characters and elements cross over. A very enjoyable and comforting book. Reviewed by Amy Dance, The Snail on the Wall in Huntsville, Alabama |
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Aggie and the Ghost by Matthew Forsythe Children, Juvenile Fiction, New Experience, Social Themes
A July/August Read This Next! KidsTitle Lovely illustrations and wonderful tale of a girl’s trials living in a haunted house with a ghost who never follows her rules.Reviewed by Alissa Redmond, South Main Book Company in Salisbury, North Carolina |
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This Place Kills Me by Mariko Tamaki Comics & Graphic Novels, Mystery& Detective, Young Adult Fiction What a pair! Thrilled to see Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux team up for This Place Kills Me, bringing together their signature skills in creating wonderful misfit weird girls to this beautifully drawn, dark, theatrical mystery. Set at an all-girls boarding school in the ’80s/’90s, I couldn’t put this book down as the secrets of the Wilberton Theatrical Society spilled out in devastating and compelling ways. Reviewed by Julie Jarema, Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, South Carolina |
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Decide for Yourself Books that appear on PEN America’s list of challenged books. |
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The Color Purple by Alice Walker Adult Fiction, Banned Books, Fiction, Literary This is one of my favorite books of all time. Heartwarming and heartbreaking. Reviewed by Annastasia Williams, The Bottom in Knoxville, Tennessee |
Southern Bestsellers What’s popular this week with Southern Readers. |
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The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali 20th Century, Adult Fiction, Bestsellers, Fiction, Friendship, Historical, Own Voices, Post-World War II This is ultimately a book about friendship and how we come back from betrayal. I was intrigued by the political changes that happened during the revolution in Iran and it has sparked me to find out more. The characters were rich and developed. I loved the lion women concept! Reviewed by Karmen Somers, Court Street Books in Florence, Alabama |
[ See the full list ] |
Parting Thought “When I say to a parent, “read to a child”, I don’t want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.” |
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The Southern Bookseller Review 8/19/25 Read More »
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.
The premise, of a family in Japan, draws on my experience directly, because I spent time in Japan with my family when I was a child. But what prompted the novel are less specific memories themselves than the hazy, fragmentary quality of my memories from that time, the extent to which they’re partial and distorted. My memories from that time feel like dreams, and their atmosphere is sometimes quite ominous. Eventually a storyline that departs pretty dramatically from any event of my life came along to suit that weird, ominous tone.
If you talk about witches nowadays and you ask somebody to picture a witch, they’d probably say a pointy hat, a broom, a black cat. They are no longer considered malevolent.
I don’t know it there’s an inspiration per se other than “I like dragons, and I like lady knights, I want to write a book about those things.” And so I did. “Brighter Than Scale” tells the story of Yeva, a dragon hunter with special abilities who was absorbed into empire against her will as a child and, as an adult, is sent as an ambassador to a nation that worships dragons as part of her emperor’s territorial aggressions. There she meets the girl-king Sookhee, the charismatic leader of the nation. But their growing relationship is threatened when Yeva uncovers secrets that will challenge the way she sees the world, and herself. The book may appear to be a queer love story, and it is indeed a queer love story, but at its core I think it’s about identity, it’s about finding your place and finding yourself in a world which constantly wants to erase you.
Rhys is a former environmental reporter for a local newspaper. I was a newspaper reporter for about seven years, and still think of myself in many ways, almost as a spot-news novelist. So, I’m still drawn to write stories as they’re happening.
There’s a part in the novel when [the protagonist] Corby says he thinks that women are just stronger than men because it’s women who come and visit the prisoners. Whether they are grandmothers who are taking care of the kids and wearing their convalescent home pinafores, girlfriends, or so forth—it’s women who show up. That was my experience when I would go to visit our son. Often, I’d be one of the few men who went into the visiting room; usually, it was another father. And sometimes I would be the only guy in the visiting room. I don’t think it’s because men are necessarily cold. They don’t necessarily detach from loved ones who are male. I think so many of men’s problems come down to fear. It’s not that women don’t live with fear, but that they can more easily voice that fear.
What’s in your book bag?
I wanted to write a controlled, intense, strange, sensual, truthful novel set firmly in a genre I’m increasingly thinking of as wonder. You can watch a romcom where someone is covered with bees and they’re terrified, and you’re laughing, so their experience is not the same as your experience. Likewise, you can be watching a horror film, and they think they’re having a normal Monday, and you know better. That’s where the horror happens.
I like my stories to be immersive. I am a visual person when writing and reading. So to me, it’s all part of the characterization: the way that they wear clothes, what the clothes look like, what they look like. I also want it to be a lived-in world. So let’s talk about getting dirty. Let’s talk about taking baths. Let’s think about chapped lips. When I watch particularly fantasy content, I almost look for these things because it is a layer of grittiness that I like, a texture in a story, that I feel is real. The Knight and the Moth was really fun, like gossamer versus armor. You can look into themes of these things too and apply them to the story, or you can decide to read them very literally.
I guess a lot of the fantasy I read as a kid was very much in the shadow of Tolkien, and in Lord of the Rings there is an objective right and wrong. You either give in to Sauron or you fight him, and the text leaves no doubt which is good and which evil. Not that I ever lost interest in Gandalf and Aragorn but as the years went on I started to find Saruman and Boromir more interesting. People who fall from grace, or rise to it. Characters in flux, in turmoil, weighing greater good against personal good, with mixed motives, with uncertain outcomes. People who surprise the reader. In our world, everyone thinks they’re in the right. Battles aren’t of good against evil, but one man’s good against another’s.
I could spend years in a cookbook shop and never get bored. Where do I begin? I love the weirdness of cookbooks; how they capture the larger culture of a specific time-period and tell the tale through the prism of food. Take, for example, one of my cookbook treasures: The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook by Robin Leach. It’s a time capsule of the eighties — glass block, Dynasty-style hairdos, Brooke Shields — and the food is as awful as the fashion. Or another favorite: A Treasury of Great Recipes by Vincent and Mary Price, a collection of all the menus that the famous horror maestro and his wife collected over their world travels in the ‘40s and ‘50s and the meals that they hosted for their friends in their exquisite Hollywood home. If I could jump into the pages of a cookbook, it might be that one.
Food has always been an obsession of mine, but I had never written it really into my fiction, aside from, occasionally describing what somebody was eating, describing a flavor somebody remembered. But this was the first time where, I think years of reading cookbooks, of watching cooking shows, of watching my parents cook, of cooking myself, and experiencing different flavors and different cuisines, and being really tuned into that…I think this was when all of that sort of manifested. This was my first try at writing something that felt like eating. And there were even moments where I would try to eat the foods that I was describing to get the mouth feel right…I completely invented recipes for for several of the dishes in Aftertaste that wind up being these sort of spiritual connections that can bring a spirit back. And in some cases, I would attempt to make the flavors, but in most cases, I just knew in my head what it would taste like from from just experiencing cooking and experiencing flavors. I would use that sort of intuition, also paired with what that character needed at the time. So I think one of the things in Aftertaste that happens is that the food is never just the food. The food is really evocative of a particular flavor of memory. So is it they’re sweet? Is it? Is it something that really disturbs the spirit that’s trying to come back? Is it something warm? Is it something that they’re excited to taste again? Is it a recollection that buoys them, or is it something that crushes them?
