Saturday Review: “Ever Haunted” a review by Amanda M. Cappelli
The Kudzu Queen (2023) by Mimi Herman
Hemlock Hollow (2022) by Culley Holderfield.
We’re just a few days, at most a week away from our next issue online. Here’s another sneak peak into what’s to come. (And this Saturday Review comes to you from Amber Knox, Editorial Assistant)
Regular NCLR reviewer Amanda Cappelli places two new North Carolina novels in clear relation to the literary field they are joining: “Faulkner’s old truths, pillars of US Southern literature, reverberate throughout the pages of Culley Holderfield’s Hemlock Hollow and Mimi Herman’s The Kudzu Queen. In fact, one might say they are haunted by them.” Cappelli highlights the emotional heart of these two stories and the “universal truths of love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and, ultimately and always, sacrifice” that run through both.
Cappelli digs into the stories of the two novels, both released by Regal House Publishing of Raleigh, NC. Both writers offer us historical novels that seem haunted by North Carolina’s past and by the characters’ presents. The Kudzu Queen presents us with the narrative of a young girl growing “from the child, afraid to even touch the door of Mary’s cabin, to a young woman, aware of the sacrifice life often requires” while Hemlock Hollow tells the story of a woman forced to “contend with deeply buried trauma surrounding her mother’s death and the fraught relationship she had with her father following it.”
Herman’s coming-of-age novel is set in 1941 in Cooper County, NC, and “follows fifteen-year-old Mathilda “Mattie” Lee Watson as she discovers the kind of person she wants to be and the work needed to become that person.” Whether in the Kudzu Queen beauty contest, or in the presence of the Kudzu King himself, James T. Cullowee, or of her friends and family, Herman explores Mattie’s “rocky transition from childhood to young adulthood steeped in historical detail.”
With two storylines, one set in the 1880s and the other a century later in the 1980s, Culley Holderfield’s Hemlock Hollow is a “richly textured novel . . . a study of place and past, and of the hold that the past can have on a particular square of geography.” The novel follows Caroline McAlister and Carson Quinn, connected across a century by the same patch of land.
Cappelli’s review presents us with two engaging historical novels that speak to each other and to their own historically fraught narratives that will leave readers “with a deeper sense of North Carolina’s unique history and the way it fits into the larger tapestry of Southern narratives.”
Read the review before it is published this fall from your local independent bookstore.
