Gods in Alabama
Aug 8, 2005
Reviewed by Dana
Gods in Alabama
By Joshilyn Jackson
0-446-52419-0
2005
The first few lines set the tone of the book: "There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniels, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. I left one back there myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the kudzu and left it to the roaches."
Arlene Fleet made a deal with God: don’t ever let the body be found and she will never, ever return to Possett, Alabama, she will never lie again, and she will stop fornicating with every man she sees.
By going to college in Chicago, she kept one part of the bargain, and as her boyfriend, Burr knows, her celibacy promise is good as well. When an old foe, Rose Mae Lolley, shows up on her doorstep, her promise never to lie again is challenged. And it looks like God might not be keeping his side of the bargain since Rose is looking for high school quarterback, Jim Beverly, a particular someone that Arlene left dead and lying in a field of kudzu twelve years before.
But secrets have a way of coming to light and Arlene knows it is a matter of time until hers is revealed as long as Rose continues on her search.
With Aunt Florence pressuring her to come back to Possett for her uncle’s retirement party, and Burr, who is African American, pressuring her to introduce him to her red-neck white family, Arlene sees returning to her roots and facing her past inevitable. So she and Burr pack up and leave for southern Alabama.
Once there, Arlene’s story occasionally takes us back to the past to see Arlene as the school slut, and her southern-belle, virgin cousin, Clarice. In bits and pieces, the reader is slowly let in on Arlene’s secret and then an even deeper one as well. As Arlene finds steady love with Burr, she also finds the familial love that she thought she never had.
Jackson is an upcoming new southern author who gives us raw emotion and a mystery worth reading. Her next book, Between, Georgia, is due out in 2006.
