Just Jennifer

The Tilted World by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly (William Morrow, October 1, 2013)

In 1927 Mississippi, and throughout much of the South, it rained inches a day for months, swelling the Mississippi River and her tributaries to depths never before seen, compromising the levees that protected the small towns along the shore and the people living in those towns.  Dixie Clay Holliver is just twenty-two, but in her six years of marriage she has watched her young ambitious husband Jesse turn mean and greedy, bribing whomever he feels necessary to accomplish his means, has buried a child and has become the best bootlegger in the Greenville area.  When two revenuers, looking for what they assume is Jesse’s still, vanish without a trace, Hoover sends to more agents, Ted Ingersoll and Ham Johnson back to Hobnob to find what happened to the two men and finish their work.  On the way into town, they stumble upon a crime scene and an abandoned baby.  Ingersoll, who grew up an orphan, can’t bear to leave the baby at an orphanage and finds his way to Dixie Clay when he hears she is heart sick from the death of her infant son.  What he doesn't expect is to fall in love with her and find that she is behind the successful bootlegging operation, two things that set off a chain of events changing everything for Hobnob and its residents as the river continues to rise higher and higher.

Husband and wife team, novelist Franklin and poet Fennelly have created not only a meticulously depicted, historically accurate novel, but a lyrical story of falling in and out of love and families and the different ways we create and destroy them.  The plot is haunting and the despair of some of the characters is palpable; Dixie Clay, Ham and Ingersoll all find themselves doing things they, until this point in time, could never have imagined doing, things they must do not only to survive but to be able to once again live.  Each character’s past is deftly woven into the narrative creating well-developed characters who live and breathe on these pages.   An eloquent novel to be savored.