it is totally okay to float old reviews when you suddenly have a picture of yourself and the author to attach to them. also, when you are bored. but only once a day. anything more than that becomes boring. or desperate.



one of the best books i have read, ever.

and exactly what i was looking for when i posted my query in my very own readers' advisory group. so, thank you, james, this is a perfect suggestion to the kind of book i was looking for. and i am going to immerse myself in tom franklin's ba More...

Gorgeous...

Gorgeous and dripping with emotion and ache...

This story OWNED ME from the opening page and LARRY OTT is among the most endearing, heart-wrenching characters I've come across in a long, long time. That I connected so well with both the story and its main character surprised me because, being born and raised in Vegas, my own life experience is so vastly different from both Larry and the town of Chabot, Mississippi, where the story takes place. I give heaping mounds of credit to author More...

Oh, small-town, rural America, why must you scare me so? Why must this book, written about you, kill something inside me with every page? Why does it, and you by proxy, need to crush me with loneliness and sadness and desperation?



This is a profoundly sad book about sadness in life, which is sad. And I'm not even being a brat here when I say that. There's nothing about this story that's even remotely optimistic, even the quasi-hopeful ending is very sad, if you think about it.

And why wouldn't i More...

It was Kemper's review that made me add this book to my shelf. It was Stephen's that made me rush to the library after work and grab a copy.

After reading Shine and Winter's Bone, I was hesitant about reading another depressing story set in the south, but I’m so glad I did.

Larry Ott had a tough childhood growing up in rural Mississippi. He was sickly and he had a stutter. He never quite fit in among his classmates, usually the butt of a joke or the target of a bully. His dad was cold, distant a More...

M, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, humpback, humpback, I.--How southern children are taught to spell Mississippi


Tom Franklin

My wife's family is from Prentiss, Mississippi not far from where the action of this book takes place. When her grandmother died a few years ago we went down for the funeral. This was my first time in Mississippi and I remember a couple of things about the experience. First, this is small town USA and there were two funeral homes. O More...

Pearl Ruled: CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER by TOM FRANKLIN (p96)

Rating: one grudging star of five

This review has been revised and can be found at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: Thoughts following a second reading

"The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house."

Read that first sentence. What? It doesn't grab you? Keep reading. It's like that long slow climb up to the peak of that first drop on the roller coaster. Hear the click of the chain pulling you to the top? After you hit the top, you're in for a ride.



First came this mean little collection of a novella and More...

To write a review of this book, I had to consciously give myself permission not "to do it justice" because I'm not up to the challenge. Sorry -- especially since CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER puts the impact of injustice in the reader's face, belly, and heart. Besides injustice, Tom Franklin's novel is about finding missing pieces and putting them together, not about taking the whole apart. And so I won't explore pieces that scream "ANALYZE THIS" -- the novel's epigraph, its structure, the name More...

Guh! This book ... (flails helplessly) ... it is a gut puncher, heart-wrencher. Franklin is a poet, his prose sings, his characters walk off the page, and he puts the reader into a time and place that absolutely resonates with a vibrancy and brutal honesty all its own.

I was so sad -- so emotionally invested -- that I found the reading painful to bear at times. Franklin's descriptions of human isolation and loneliness are so raw and uncompromising I forced myself to take breathers between readin More...

There are books that you read as you drift off to sleep, setting them aside and then coming back to them the next night. This is not that type of book. Based on my experience, this is the kind of book that you pick up at night and then read straight through, getting up several times to avoid sleep, in order to keep reading. From the first line, I was transfixed. While the book is well plotted and interesting, it was the characters that kept me turning the pages late last night. Larry Ott, town b More...

This is a good ol' Southern mystery that really isn't that much of a mystery, since we know who the culprits are (and aren't) nearly as soon as they are introduced. However, there are some twists and revelations along the way. What this story is really about, though, is not a whodunnit, but the two characters who are inextricably and unwillingly tied to events that happened in both the present day and nearly 30 years ago.

The first of our protagonists, Larry Ott, gets shot in chapter one. From th More...

opening: THE RUTHERFORD GIRL had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house. It’d stormed the night before over much of the Southeast, flash floods on the news, trees snapped in half and pictures of trailer homes twisted apart. Larry, forty-one years old and single, lived alone in rural Mississippi in his parents’ house, which was now his house, though he couldn’t bring himself to think of it that way. He acted more like a curator, keeping t More...

Deceptively good.

Town outcast, missing teen girl, the obvious happens in the minds and attitudes of the townsfolk, cops get involved.

That's basically what they would have you believe this book was about. It's not, that's just stuff that happens in the background of the story of two middle aged men, former childhood friends, whose lives were changed by an unsavoury incident in their youth and how they come to deal with who they are and what they've done. In other words, literature.

I wanted to lov More...

I loved this book! Although it may be classified as crime fiction, it belongs with other great literary works, along the lines of "To Kill a Mockingbird." I loved the author's use of the southern drawl, as well as his character development. This should be a movie, giving it exposure to the non-readers out there.

Sometimes you read a sentence and think, "Exactly," and believe you could've written this same thing. other times, you read something and just think, "Wow". Tom Franklin writes like that. I love how he thinks and I love how lyrical his words are. The story is a compelling look at racism, ignorance, and small-town mentality in a southern Mississippi town. The story is suspenseful, not because you don't know who the bad guys are, but because it doesn't matter who the bad guys are. Bad things happe More...

Oh. My .God. It happened. I knew it would happen. Reading the Faever books did make me stupid. It's the only thing I can think of to explain how, against all of the glowing praise this novel gets here, I found it to be so, so boring. I can't even say I read it, I literally skimmed through it.

What can I do to get my brain back,people? It seems to have shriveled up and died after I read those 5 pseudo fantasy porn books. Will I have bad taste in novels forever now? Will I dislike a book if it doe More...

The geeks may have seized a nice chunk of pop culture these days, but it’s too easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago when reading and collecting comic books made you a bit odd. Long before remaking ’70s slasher films with as much blood as possible was considered mainstream entertainment, liking Stephen King novels or other horror books and movies might get your folks a closed door session with your teacher. Before Lord of the Rings made a gazillion dollars and won Oscars, you probably woul More...

This is not your typical murder mystery. It's about humans - humans who abandon their friends, who are afraid to speak up when it might help someone else and finally, about a man who grew up when he finally told the entire story that had caused a town to ostracize his friend.

The story begins with Silas, a deputy, finding a body in the swamp and having the feeling that he should check on an old childhood friend, Larry. He asks another deputy to do so and Larry is found shot, laying in a pool of b More...

This was a very well-written book. I actually listened to it on audio. That was a little difficult at first because throughout the story, there are flashbacks. They are from different characters' perspectives and not necessarily in chronological order. Because I couldn't see the separation between paragraphs on the page, it was hard for me at first to understand what was going on. As I learned the structure, I was fine.

The narrator was excellent. His character voices were amazing. It literally s More...

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
New York: HarperCollins, Publishers
$24.99 - 274 pages

“MI crooked letter, crooked letter I, crooked letter, crooked letter I, humpback, humpback, I”

(how southern children are taught to spell Mississippi.)

How many times have you heard the lament, “They don’t write southern novels the way they used to”? This statement is usually followed by a catalog of classics like To Kill a Mockingbird along with a few reverent references to Truman Capote, Carson McC More...

I read this book thanks to a recommendation/review from Stephen. You might as well go check that out for a more thorough and in-depth review than you'll ever find here.

This is not a book I would normally have picked up on my own, so I have GoodReads to thank for it. It was worth it.

The story is about an ostracized man, Larry Ott, who lives in the deep South (of the US). Though he was never formally charged with anything, when he was young he was suspected of raping and murdering a girl by the en More...

A mechanic living a solitary existence in a rural town in southeastern Mississippi, Larry Ott is surrounded by a town that despises him for his involvement in the disappearance of a girl twenty years earlier. Silas Jones was Larry’s only pal when they were in school. Now he is the town constable and when another girl suddenly goes missing, Silas is not just forced to confront the possibility that Larry was once again involved, he must confront his own past – which is swiftly catching up with him More...

“The Rutherford girl had been missing eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.”

He is not surprised. Larry had been an outcast for as long as he could remember. He was an odd child: he loved to read, he was mechanically disinclined, and he was the only child of lower - middle class parents. His mother prayed that he would find a friend and he did in Silas Jones, the son of a single poor woman. They were as different as day and night. Larry was white. Sila More...

This is not my usual kind of book to read. Contemporary fiction and books focused in the South generally don't appeal to me, so I really appreciate the groups I have joined here which have broadened my reading horizons, without a group read, I would certainly have missed this excellent novel.

The relationships and connections the author details kept me turning the pages and I finished this book in record time. It felt authentic and real. Every one of the chatacters were believable. From page one More...

Do you ever wonder what the secret formula is for commercial success of a novel these days? How Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" and Kathryn Stockett's "The Help" can dominate the NY Times Bestseller List for 2 years ? (as of this writing, Ms. Stockett's ode to the hired help in Mississippi has been in the top ten for NINETY weeks. 1 1/2 years. How?!?!) A special alignment in the stars? A feeling of transcendence for the reader? Or is it just another example of THE OPRAH EFFECT?

Consider the ma More...

I liked this book well enough. It was a well-written story with all too familar themes of racial tensions after de-segregation. The author tells the story from the past and present perspectives of two childhood friends, one white and one black, in a seemless manner as if the characters are reliving those experiences. This book is not meant to a page turner. I think that author intends for the reader to be absorbed into the chacaters' lives so I never had that feeling of not being able to turn th More...

I read the reviews and most of them were favorable. I ran out and purchased this book. After finishing it tonight I must say I was disappointed. I expected to love it but it was missing the wow factor for me. I did not connect with the characters at all. The imagery was good but the story wasn't strong. The idea was there but it was executed poorly. For me it was just OK.

Though Franklin's novel contains some grisly murders, the heart of the story is that of boyhood pals Larry--white, shy, lonely, and Silas--poor, black, athletic, popular. Both had a difficult childhoods, and barely acknowledge each other now over twenty years later though their complicated relationship goes very deep. As a teen Larry was the prime suspect when a girl went missing though the evidence was only circumstantial and he was never indicted. He's been ostracized by his small rural commun More...

Most of us are lucky enough to know people we can depend on, people we can trust for good, solid advice. When it comes to book recommendations, I often read the blurbs on book jackets. If I read a blurb from an author I enjoy reading, I trust the book they’re praising is also one I’ll enjoy.

When I noticed Dennis Lehane’s recommendation blurb on Tom Franklin’s “Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter,” I had to give the book a shot. Lehane is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I featured his work in More...

I have had this book on my TBR for a while and have heard such rave reviews about it recently that I decided it was time to move it up. It also worked for two of my challenges for this week. This book is a little difficult to describe as it is a thriller in a round-about way. It is more of a life lesson in that everything is not always what it seems to be. The prose was well written and both main characters were well described. It was easy to understand both men even though they are extremely di More...