1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Alabama
One observation I would make about the deep south and how it's pattern of settlement is reflected in the literature: You start out in Georgia, which was actually started as a non-slavery territory before it quickly adopted plantation slavery- Georgia had a mixture of non-slave based settlers and wealthy plantation owners, but there were plenty of long-time Georgia residents and later citizens who had nothing to do with slavery, and then an economic elite which adopted slavery and then a smaller economic elite that wasn't directly involved with slavery- or at least only indirectly involved.
Move over to Alabama and again you see a mixture of the pattern from Georgia and then a band of the second wave of slavery- based on cotton and industrial style farming. As a result, Alabama had plenty of white settlers who were not involved in slavery, a swath of territory that was basically only rich whites and enslaved blacks with a small "middle class" of non slave owning whites, and virtually no elite that was uninvolved.
By the time you get to Mississippi you see an area that was essentially settled by the second wave of plantation/cotton/industrial slavery: Few whites, almost all plantation owners and a huge population of black slaves and little elite of any kind. After the Civil War, this pattern of settlement shaped the post war population: Georgia with a legitimate African American elite and middle class, centered in Atlanta surrounded by a largely white hinterland, with the remaining African American population centered around Atlanta. In Alabama some areas became 100 percent white and others nearly 100 percent black, based on where the plantations had been located. In Mississippi, African Americans weren't resettled and essentially remained in place.
This is reflected in the 21 titles from the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. There are black authors writing about black folks and white writers writing about white folks, but race as an issue is limited to a few "issue" based and YA titles.
Another facet of Alabama that stood out compared to other states is the absence of non-black and white voices. One YA novel had minority characters as part of a prep school scenario, and editor Susan Straight found a mid book about the Jewish experience, but that is it. Even inside the short stories there is no ethnic diversity.
My last dissapointment from this chapter was the absence of any books about NASA in Huntsville- Nazi turned American Werner Von Braun was resettled in Huntsville, and I feel like Susan Straight should have been able to find a title to include.
Published 8/8/25
Hell at the Breech (2003)
by Tom Franklin
Mitcham Beat, Alabama
Alabama: 1/20
I'd probably put Alabama on a list of Ten Least Interesting states, but maybe this experience will change my mind. So far, I'd put Rhode Island and Delaware on that same list. I had to stumble into the Alabama chapter because there are so few Audiobooks (that aren't sad POV's/coming of age books about poor women) in this chapter. Hell at the Breech drew comparisons to Elmore Leonard, though I personally saw kinship with Cormac McCarthy's books from before he left Tennessee for the desert Southwest. Hell at the Breech is a rare book on from this part of the country that doesn't feature any African American characters, this being a part of the country where African Americans were forced out after the Civil War. Instead, the dynamic is poor white country-folk vs. wealthy town-folk, as illustrated by the eponymous gang of country "Night Riders," who go by Hell at the Breech.
The plot revolves not around violence against local African Americans (who apparently do not exist in this part of Alabama at the time of the novel, the 1890's) but rather traces a conflict between a local sharecropper turned general store owner and his animus against the town folk, as represented by the local Sheriff and his cousin, the Judge. The major protagonists are Mack Burke, an orphan boy who works at the store of the magnificently named Tooch Bledsoe, leader of Hell at the Breech, and the sheriff, Billy Waite.
Hell at the Breech was certainly a win for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. I'm surprised no one made it into a movie.
Published 10/10/25
Big Fish (1998)
by Daniel Wallace
Spectre, Alabama
Alabama: 2/20
My progress on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, Chapter 5, Blues & Bayous, Deltas and Coasts, which covers the swath of states from Georgia to Louisiana with Florida tacked on... has slowed to a proverbial crawl. I'd place most of the blame of the seemingly endless jury trial I'm doing in Los Angeles- between the actual time and energy spent on the case AND the fact that the drive is only 20 minutes instead of the 2/3 hours between San Diego and LA that I'm used to- it's a challenge both to find the time/energy to actually read and listen to Audiobooks as well.
Add to that the actual sadness of this part of America, between the struggles of African Americans AND socioeconomically disadvantaged whites, there is little sparkle, hope or beauty. I picked Big Fish as a jail read because it seemed easy and I'd remembered the dumb Tim Burton movie. I wasn't disappointed- even going so far as to get the special movie version of the book complete with proposed discussion prompts for a hypothetical book group discussion.
Big Fish is a "fun" read (though in a sentimental, treacly way that emphasizes the importance of family ties) in that it consists of a series of "tall tales." At the very least, there is no child abuse or overt racism in this novel.
Published 11/4/25
Jealous-Hearted Me (1997)
by Nancy Huddleston Packer
Montgomery, Alabama
Alabama: 3/20
Finally, a novel from the deep south where no one is murdered by a hateful mob. On the other hand, it is also a situation with no black characters, and so thoroughly de-racinated that I had to Google the author to figure out if the characters were supposed to be white or black. This is a book of interconnected short stories about a woman and her relationship with her mother. To put it simply, the daughter is obsessed with the mother and almost every story is focused on how the daughter yearns to spend more time with her elderly mom, while the mom goes about her business and lives her life. Not for the first, time Jealous-Hearted Me gave me occasion to reflect on how sad the lives of those lived entirely within the confines of family appear on the printed page. I'm not commenting on people who actually live this way, just as it appears as a topic/subject for art, specifically the novel.
Published 11/6/25
The Avenue, Clayton City (1988)
by C. Eric Lincoln
Clayton City, Alabama
Alabama: 4/20
Alabama is something close to being America's official Heart of Darkness. If you want to know something about the history of Alabama that they don't teach you in class, look up the racial demographics in Alabama by county. You will discover that there are many counties in Alabama with single digit African American populations. How, one might reasonably ask, is that possible? The answer, as the literature from this project makes clear, is that freed African American were essentially burned out of many areas by local white populations in the years following the Emancipation. That terror enforced segregation persists to the present.
And yet, as The Avenue, Clayton City by noted Professor-Author C. Eric Lincoln makes clear, African Americans make the choice to live and work in these parts of the country. Many leave, and many stay, and it is the interaction between these two populations that was the cause of much change in the south in the 20th century. Specifically, the ability of northern migrants to return home via automobile- a phenomenon that Lincoln describes here, in a novel set in the 1930's. One theme that resonates again and again is that resident African Americans need to make peace with the "way things are" or get out or suffer severe consequences.
Author C. Eric Lincoln is the sort of writer I relish discovering through project-based reading- he was a professor and theological scholar who taught at Duke University and wrote THE book on the Black Muslim movement, in addition to his fiction. The Avenue, Clayton City is sure to be in my top five for this state.
Published 11/7/25
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
by Harper Lee
Monroeville, Alabama
Alabama 5/20
No re-reading for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.
Published 3/15/16
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
by Harper Lee
Harper Lee is the most successful artist of all time. She wrote...one book...it's one of the most popular AND critically acclaimed novels of all time, and it is essentially taught in every school in the United States, and read world-wide. The very idea that an author could write a single novel and be set for life is itself novel. Even successful authors never sold enough books to never NEED to work again. In that way, Harper Lee is the beginning of the rock star economy, the blockbuster economy, where single works of art could provide a livelihood for one or more people over a period of decades.
Lee's recent death, and the nearly contemporaneous decision to publish what was essentially an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird as a "new" work, also represents an opportunity to look at the role of the publishing industry itself in the fashioning of Lee's tremendous success. One revelation from Go Set a Watchman is that the original book that Lee wrote was a much darker iteration of To Kill a Mockingbird. Specifically, Scout was not the narrator. Having an admittedly precious nine-year-old girl narrate this dark tale of race and justice in the deep south was a decision that was forced by the publisher. That is an excellent example of the positive role that the art-industrial complex played in the history of arts and letters.
Published: 11/10/25
Net of Jewels (1992)
by Ellen Gilchrist
Dunleith, Alabama
Alabama: 6/20
Ellen Gilchrist figuratively burst upon the national literary scene from an unlikely source: the world of university publishing (her first publisher was the University of Arkansas press). She solidified her national reputation in 1984, when she won the National Book Award (which had briefly been renamed the American Book Award) for her short-story collection, Victory Over Tokyo. That was enough to secure the notice of the New York Times for the rest of her career, though the reviews are frequently dismissive and condescending towards her preferred subject matter: the lost and winsome damsels of the mid 20th century landed gentry.
If she had written twenty years later, she would likely be known as a practitioner of "auto-fiction"- honestly, the tone of this book mostly reminded me of the warts-and-all confessional style of Karl Ove Knausgård and his "My Struggle" series. The frequent and prolific abuse of prescription medication- the south of that period must have been the epicenter for speed/diet pills being prescribed for young women, goes unanalyzed in the book, and in the criticism, which I found refreshing. In fact, I'd rate Gilchrist, who is badly out of fashion, a minor discovery within the context of this project. Not sure I'd tackle another Gilchrist title, but I wouldn't rule it out.
Published 11/11/25
Criminal Trespass (1985)
by Helen Hudson
Simms Quarter, Alabama
Alabama: 7/20
Northern Alabama is the biggest geographic blank spot on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America map. It doesn't have anything to do with a lack of potential titles- Huntsville, Alabama, the home of NASA is there, surely you could pick something that happened there. Also, Muscle Shoals, home of a famous recording studio and well known "sound" has inspired at least a half dozen novels.
Criminal Trespass is that most suspect of categories, a book with a black protagonist written by a white woman. I just read a book like this near the end of the Georgia chapter, Strange Fruit, by Lillian Smith. However, Strange Fruit was published in 1944. Criminal Trespass, on the other hand, was published in 1985. It was also reviewed in the New York Times without a mention of the awkwardness of the author/protagonist relationship. Not something that would be tolerated in 2025, a fact obviously known by editor Susan Straight, but here we are. It's like the subject matter is extraordinary either, there are at least a dozen other books in this section of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project and another dozen in the last chapter.
Published 12/3/25
Dessa Rose (1986)
by Sherley Anne Williams
Marengo County, Alabama
Alabama: 8/20
Dessa Rose was a genuine surprise from the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, a transgressive work of fiction about a white plantation wife and a band of escaped slaves she shelters- set in the 1830's. It is the first book set in the 19th century in the South which depicts a sexual relationship between a male slave and a female mistress- which- if you just kind of described the outlines of the culture in this part of the country, you would think relationships between black men and white women would be, whatever else, an interesting subject for literary fiction. But it is not, and I think that is because, unlike relationships between white men and black women, relationships between black men and white women were punishable by immediate extrajudicial murder.
I'd like to say that this idea is either a myth or exaggeration, but the essential truth of this situation is revealed in cases like the murder of Emmett Till, an African American murdered for allegedly cat-calling a white woman in public. I imagine there are still parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia where a black man/white woman couple would face trouble. The relationship depicted here is a casual one, but the utter absence of any fully developed relationships between black men and white women across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana is enough to give one pause. Really? Not a single novel written on the subject. Perhaps there is a work of science fiction out there that covers such a relationship in an alternate universe.
Published 12/4/25
Four Spirits (2003)
by Sena Jeter Naslund
Birmingham, Alabama
Alabama: 9/20
I'm mention again that Northern Alabama is the biggest literary dark patch I've observed since upstate New York. The sole exception is four novels set in Birmingham, all within six blocks of each other. Three of the books are works of historical fiction about the Civil Rights movement, the last is set at a strangely integrated high school. Four Spirits is a complicated mutlti-viewpoint novel that switches between white and black characters. The four spirits are the four girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15th, 1963. Naslund is nothing if not committed to the bit, including as one of her characters a highly unconvincing Klu Klux Klan bomb maker. The characters closer to her own experience are more believable but overall, I thought the single incident was thin source material for a book that tries to convey multiple points of view. The chapters involving the actual Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King and his local counterparts were interesting but also reminded me of the almost total absence of political fiction in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- it's domestic fiction till the cows come home in the Deep South.
Published: 12/5/25
Crazy in Alabama (1993)
by Mark Childress
Industry, Alabama
Alabama: 10/20
It's the half-way mark for the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. The Alabama chapter is weak, and it got me thinking how editor Susan Straight made her picks for this state, where the only sure-fire canon level pick is To Kill a Mockingbird. I realized, walking the dog last night, that you can use the subject categories from the Library of Congress, like Alabama - fiction, to look at every title so classified, and that there was likely to be a 100% overlap. The Alabama - fiction tag in the library of congress returns about 330 titles. I looked through 80 of them on my walk and saw 40% of the titles from this chapter, so I think it is likely that Straight must have had the same insight.
Crazy in Alabama is the kind of title that would have driven me nuts as an Audiobook but was fine to read in physical form. It's a comic novel, later turned into a film by Antonio Banderas, of all people, starring Melanie Griffith, about an abused housewife in small-town Alabama who murders his husband and escapes to Hollywood to pursue her dream as an actress. Meanwhile, back at home her relatives deal with the consequences of her actions and their own feelings about the incipient civil rights movement.
Published: 12/8/25
Looking for Alaska (2005)
by John Green
Culver Creek (Birmingham), Alabama
Alabama: 11/20
I checked out the Hulu Version of this paperback- with a picture of who I presume was the actress who played the eponymous Alaska of the title. Before I shit all over this book let me just say that I understand that John Green has multiple YA hits (The Fault in our Stars), that he is a popular YouTuber and I think Podcaster, and that he has lots of fans some of whom might actually read this post. In other words, Looking for Alaska is a hit, and the author has other hits, but the books are terrible.
Set in a progressive co-ed high school and narrated by a fish-out-of-water type, Green brings together a familiar band of misfits which includes a Japanese guy buy no African American. In fact, there are no African American characters in this book which is enough to make me hate John Green. There's nothing specific to Alabama in this book beyond, I think, the geographical location of the school and the fact that the author went to a similar school in Birmingham. You can tell it's a new generation of YA author because of the presence of the most harmless blowjob depicted in this history of literature in these pages.
Published 12/9/25
The Watsons Go To Birmingham (1995)
by Christopher Paul
Birmingham, Alabama
Alabama: 12/20
Arguably not a book about Birmingham since most of the book takes place in Detroit before the Watsons Go To Birmingham (right before the church bombing). This is a children's book, not a YA title, so it is pretty straightforward. The Watsons does have a road trip, which, I think because of the map-based categorization of the titles, are sorely lacking in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. The most interesting portion of this title was, in fact, the drive itself.
Just the fact that this family hops in a car and drives somewhere not in their neighborhood puts them in a rare subgroup of this project. It's like, for most of the characters in these books, the idea that one might just leave the terrible place where they happen to have been born is unfathomable. I mean, I'm talking about hundreds of books at this point. And this observation has nothing to do with this title in particular but it's crazy how none of these books have characters who in any way, shape, or form transcend their surroundings or low beginnings. Stasis and regression is the rule of thumb in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, and not just for the South, although that weight is heavy in Alabama.
Published 12/11/25
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (1977)
by Mildred D. Taylor
Jackson, Mississippi
Mississippi: 13/20
Ran out of Audiobooks in Alabama about one Audiobook in, so it is on to Mississippi and Louisiana, where the pickings are almost but not quite as slim. The rule with Audiobooks in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is no chick lit and no YA titles- everything else, including actual children's books, of which this is one. This is a good children's book, written before kids were wimps and parents were insane. Back in the 1970's an African American author could use the n word in a children's book and win Awards, nowadays some libraries won't even carry this title for the same reason.
Roll of Thunder was a genuinely effective children's book, like something out of the nineteenth century and filled with the unmitigated terror of the "Night Riders" on a community of African Americans in rural Mississippi. The protagonists is the youngest daughter of a rare family of African American property owners- with the land now in the second generation of the family. That already makes Mississippi different than Alabama, where some of the book's detail how it was impossible for African American families to even rent, let alone own land in swathes of Alabama.
Many times as I listened to this Audiobook I thought about the horror movies of Jordan Peele and the idea that the African American experience in much of America is, in fact, a real-life horror film. You look at the central family in this book: Property owning farmers, no bad habits and their very existence is an affront to their white neighbors. These people are literally not allowed to live. It is a deeply Unamerican environment and I think there is a strong argument that it simply is not.
Published 12/15/25
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987)
by Fannie Flagg
Whistle Stop, Alabama (Mobile area)
Alabama: 13/20
The last geographic cluster of Alabama books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America map is around Mobile- on the Gulf coast in the south of the state. It's another area I have never visited. Nor, for that matter, do I have any idea that I ever might be there. The same can't be said for northern Alabama, easily reachable from Nashville (a place I've been and could go again). Mobile doesn't have the historic heft of the Birmingham and its important role in the Civil Rights movement. I didn't get much of a feel for real world Birmingham, since Fried Green Tomatoes is close to being a fantasy novel about some semi-idealized version of the south where decent people actually exist.
Fried Green Tomatoes mostly reminded me of The Oldest Living Confederate War Widow Tells All, which uses a similar narrative convention (death bed flashbacks from one of the protagonists with an interlocutor trying to figure out confused events of the past. Widow was published in 1984, which makes me think author Fannie Flagg must have read it. Unlike Widow, Tomatoes is not 800 pages long. The central themes, which treat both racial and LGBTQ issues in a sympathetic light, made me laugh, because the attitudes in this book are unlike any in the other 50 plus titles in this chapter. Here, we've got a small-town Alabama sheriff who is protective of his African American community, and an LGBTQ business owner who isn't afraid to stand up to racists and suffer no consequences from her actions. That is not the Deep South I've read about up to this point- where the characters in this book would have all been murdered for their behavior. Maybe it has something to do with Mobile.
Published 1/8/26
Grace (2016)
by Natashia Deon
Faunsdale, Alabama
Alabama: 14/20
I probably would have enjoyed Grace more if I had read it outside of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. I don't consider myself particularly sensitive to depictions of sexual violence, but it is hard to ignore the presence of sexual violence either explicitly or implied in nearly every book in this chapter. Grace did stand out in terms of the ambition and literary merit- it is peppered with modernist techniques that make the story much more difficult to follow than your normal life during the antebellum south book. It was also what you would call "unflinching" which made the frequent sexual violence more squirm inducing. What is clear to me after this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is that getting real about slavery in the American South is really digging into the very worst of humanity.
The books set in this part of America- the cotton belt of the deep south, put on display a kind of worst-of-the-worst environment because essentially all of the slaves in this part of the country were ripped out of their existing families in the upper south and sold "down the river," creating a profound double fracture. The fact that these populations were freed and essentially abandoned is one the great cruelties of American history.
But the literary merit here is undeniable- making this book a top three title for Alabama simply on the basis of artistic ambition. It's just that this a rough read.
Published 1/20/25
Dogfight and Other Stories (1996)
by Michael Knight
Mobile, Alabama
Alabama: 15/20
This was a good one- sadly a book of short stories. The Gulf Coast of Alabama seems pretty interesting- sometimes people go there on the house hunting shows on HGTV and this is the first novel where you get a sense of that white, upper-middle class existence, also white working-class existence, no non-white characters in this book. The sense I got from Dogfight was lonely white guys, looking out to the Gulf of Mexico-America.
Published 1/26/26
The Last Hotel for Women (1996)
by Vicki Covington
Birmingham, Alabama
Alabama: 16/20
I think Alabama is probably the worst literary state thus far. They don't even have a good detective novel/police procedural down here. The Last Hotel for Women is interesting by the standards of its Alabama mapped compatriots, in that it features historical villain Bull Connor as not just a major character, but sometimes narrator of this story of the Freedom Riders. It's struck me reading books from this part of the country that there is no one epic novel of this period that goes day by day, month by month, year by year and that learning the nuts and bolts of how this all went down requires non-fiction titles. Covington, at least, brings some insight to the less sympathetic side, as embodied by Connor, who was a staunch segregationist.
Bull Connor distinguishes himself as a rare type of villain in the deep south- an urban villain, ruling over a mixed population in an industrialized city, of which I believe Birmingham is the only one- in the sense that we use that term in reference to locales like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Cleveland circa the mid 20th century. He is sophisticated enough that the n word is used less frequently in this novel than in almost any other from this state, and the contention here is not whether some people should enslave other people. As Connor himself says multiple times in this book, he loves his black brothers and sisters and just wants them to thrive separately from whites.
I hadn't heard of Convington before this book. Looking at her Amazon product listings, I would probably put her as "forgotten."
Published 1/28/26
Train Whistle Guitar (1974)
by Albert Murray
Gasoline Point, Alabama
Alabama: 17/20
I know I've been saying this since I reached the halfway point, but I will be glad to see the end of Alabama. Train Whistle Guitar, by noted African American critic and novelist Albert Murray, was a real discovery. I'm not a jazz guy, so I haven't read any of his criticism, but I was vaguely aware of his influence on multiple generations of subsequent critics and scholars, and the fact that he lived long enough to see himself canonized. Among his works of criticism, Train Whistle Guitar was the first in a series of novels following the childhood and adulthood of a Murray-like character named Scooter, who Wikipedia describes as an "alter-ego."
Train Whistle Guitar is the rare 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that shows any kind of interest in modernist technique, specifically, there is no third person narrator voice giving the reader explanatory paragraphs- you are just in the world with Murray. Reading this book in Court and at jail, it was clear I should have taken more time with it, so that I could focus on the technique, but alas.
Published 2/4/26
Chicken Dreaming Corn (2004)
by Roy Hoffman
Mobile, Alabama
Alabama: 18/20
This is the first book wholly centered on the "Jewish experience" in this Chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. I myself have family who settled in Atlanta and later in Florida, so I have some idea about Southern Jews (I'm Jewish), but Chicken Dreaming Corn is a fairly conventional first-generation immigration novel about a family of Romanian Jews living in Mobile Alabama immediately before and during the Great Depression.
Other than physical location there isn't much to distinguish the events here from similar titles from the New York chapter. Historically, Jews were prevented from owning land in much of Europe, and often physically restricted to urban environments, meaning that few Jewish emigrants became farmers in the United States. In rural areas, they were travelling salesman and shop keepers. The frontier nature of the Deep South/Cotton Belt in the early 19th century meant that successful Jews did become plantation owners, and the vice president of the Confederacy was Jewish. Additionally, Jewish merchants and bankers played a key role in financing crops like cotton and getting them to domestic and foreign markets.
This book though is just a narrowly depicted family history with none of that complexity of the Jewish experience in the South.
Published 2/5/26
Forrest Gump (1986)
by Winston Groom
Mobile, Alabama
Alabama: 19/20
It was back in August of 2025 that I tackled my first title in the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. Now, here we are. Most of the work was done in November- what stands out is that this was the first state where I decided to eschew Audiobooks on the theory that it would be insufferable having to listen to most of these titles. I don't regret the decision, which means that I'm running three states ahead in Audiobook titles right now (Florida) while physical books are stuck back in Mississippi and Louisiana. My Audiobook consumption is dropping precipitously- a trend which started last year but is really apparent this year.
Forrest Gump is, of course, the source material for the Tom Hanks film. I was surprised that the book Forres Gump is described more like John Cena, to use a contemporary example, than Tom Hanks. He is depicted as six foot six and heavily muscled, which, we all know Tom Hanks is not. Wouldn't call myself a fan of the film (who is?) but of course I saw it like everyone else. As is to be expected, the book is sharper on the edges than the Ron Howard directed film. Gump is no racist, but the amount of n words thrown around was disturbing in a book published in the 80's that had little or nothing to say about racism.
There's also little of Mobile Alabama in the book- as the movie depicts, Gump appears Zelig-like at many of the most important events of the late 20th century.
1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Run Away Home (1997)
by Patricia C. McKissack
Mount Vernon, Alabama
Alabama: 20/20
Run Away Home is an actual children's book, not a YA Novel, which is refreshing in the context of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. The line between children's and adult fiction is actually thinner than the line between YA fiction and adult fiction. Literature is filled with children's books that have reached canonical status in the adult lit world, whereas YA fiction has provided many films and television shows with material for adaptation. Run Away Home is about an Apache boy who escapes from a train taking his people from Arizona to Florida, where they were held for several years in the late 19th century.
The young African American girl who finds him becomes attached, and the story, about the girl's father struggling to maintain his piece of land in the face of white resistance, is a familiar one.
Instagram