Looking to read more Indiana authors?
Every month, we’re releasing a book review highlighting a new book by a Hoosier author, reviewed by a Hoosier writer. Check back every month for a new recommendation or look for the review in your local paper.
All Book Reviews
You Should See Me in a Crown
By Leah Johnson | Reviewed By Kekla Magoon
High school senior Liz Lighty loves being in band, staying under the social radar, and—unbeknownst to all but her best friends—girls. It’s not that it’s a secret, exactly, it just…never really comes up. When financial aid for Pennington, her top-choice college, falls through, Liz voluntarily-but-unwillingly joins the popular crowd in their high school’s annual contest to be named prom queen. The crown comes with a $10,000 scholarship award—just enough cash to get […]
Where the Angels Lived
By Margaret McMullan | Reviewed By Rabbi Sandy Sasso
What does it mean to find the name of a relative you never knew existed? What would it take to travel to another country to piece together a picture of that person’s life? What would compel you to upend your, your husband and son’s life to learn about a person who never even appeared in a family photo album? In Where […]
How Quickly She Disappears
By Raymond Fleischmann | Reviewed By Larry D. Sweazy
Midwesterners are often characterized as stoic, polite to a fault, and hard workers who do anything they can not to draw attention to themselves. Enter Elisabeth Metzger Pfautz, known to her friends and husband as Else, the main character in Raymond Fleischmann’s debut novel, How Quickly She Disappears. Elisabeth was born and raised in Pennsylvania, a product of a small town and farming community […]
Indiana Hill Country Poems
By Norbert Krapf | Reviewed By Edward Byrne
Norbert Krapf deftly invites readers of his poetry to visit places personally important to him and to meet the people, past and present, with whom he has shared those locations. Within the carefully crafted lines of poetry in Indiana Hill Country Poems, his work repeatedly displays deep insight into the human condition, compelling a certain […]
The Lucky One
By Lori Rader-Day | Reviewed By Michael Koryta
The missing stay missing, so they can’t report back, Lori Rader-Day writes on the first page of her excellent fifth novel, The Lucky One. And then she proceeds to report back for the missing, across 377 pages of intricately woven suspense. The Lucky One is very much a novel of contemporary concerns, and even contemporary […]
Wake Up, Woods
By Gillian Harris (Illustrations), Michael Homoya (Text), Shane Gibson (Verses) | Reviewed By Helen Frost
On the beautiful front cover of this book, a mouse sniffs along the edge, a caterpillar munches on a leaf, and a bee gathers pollen from a flower. Another flower remains closed, but you can almost see it begin to unfold its petals and open to the sun. Everything about the image—mouse, leaves, flowers, caterpillar and bee—invite the reader to open the book […]
Now Entering Addamsville
By Francesca Zappia | Reviewed By Sarah J. Schmitt
Francesca Zappia’s newest novel, Now Entering Addamsville, opens with a fiery mystery. When George Masrell’s house burns down in the middle of the night, all eyes in Addamsville turn to local teen Zora Novak. Never mind that she was on the other side of town trying to make up for the crimes of her father. Or the fact that the last time she’d been near a fire she’d woken […]
Do Not Go On
By Bryan Furuness | Reviewed By Lori Rader-Day
Late in Bryan Furuness’s Do Not Go On, the narrator, the current director of the federal Witness Security Program, recalls his predecessor telling a story to a family that will soon go into hiding. While no one in the room seems to be taking in the plot, the narrator sees his old boss as “Charon, […]
Tornado Weather
By Deborah E. Kennedy | Reviewed By Cathy Day
There are two ways to write about Indiana—warmly and fuzzily, stirred by sentimentality and nostalgia, and a way that tells the truth. Take for example Deborah E. Kennedy’s debut novel, Tornado Weather, the most recent emerging author winner of the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards. Which kind is it? The title of the […]
The Book of Delights
By Ross Gay | Reviewed By Callista Buchen
In The Book of Delights, a collection of lyric essays by Ross Gay from Algonquin Books, Gay describes “feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight.” Driven by that impulse, Gay writes the 102 short essays that make up The Book of Delights, exploring delight with beauty, humor, and a tender, […]
