Robert McCammon's
Boy's Life and Fannie Flagg's
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe are both set in Alabama and they couldn't be more different. McCammon's book (a Bram Stoker award winning fantasy/horor) is set in Zephyr, Alabama in 1964 and it opens with a chilling scene as a car plunges into a lake some say are bottomless. A milkman who witnesses the accident while makings his rounds with his son, dives down to see if he can rescue the driver and discovers...this was no accident. Flagg's book, the basis for the movie
Fried Green Tomatoes, is set in the fictional town of Whistle Stop, Alabama and tells the story of a friendship between two women and plays out against various timelines. I highly recommend both books.
And then there's
This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijcamp. Set in Opportunity, Alabama, it's the story of a school shooting told through multiple points of view. I have a fondness for that kind of storytelling (Ryan Gattis' All Involved is probably my favorite) and the writer does a fantastic job here. The book is tagged as YA but it is in the vein of Angie Thomas' T
he Hate U Give than John Green's
The Fault in Our Stars.
the shooter in Nijcamp's book, Tyler Browne, is an outcast whose rage is fueled by the mantra, "I will make sure you remember me." In some ways it will remind readers of Todd Strasser's
Give a Boy a Gun, a novel based on the 1999 Columbine school shooting.
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