The Gods of Green County: A Novel

There are not a plethora of novels set in Northeastern Arkansas and the bootheel of Missouri, but Pope’s debut novel explores this beautiful and sparsely populated country, full of cotton fields and tiny towns-and is all the richer for the author’s relationship to this setting and the characters of this story. Gods of Green County began as a series of poems published in Arkansas Review and is based on Mary Elizabeth Pope’s family history-her grandmother’s commitment to an insane asylum and her brother’s murder by a sheriff on the main street of town, the snake-handling Pentecostal church her father grew up in (which Pope sometimes attended), and the many decades her family worked in cotton. She even has copies of her grandmother’s records and mugshot from the asylum and the newspaper article about her brother’s murder by a sheriff on the main street of town. Although Pope herself grew up in Michigan, many of her relatives migrated north on the hillbilly pipeline for work in Flint, so even when she wasn’t down south, they were around her all the time, and their accents and stories left an indelible impression on her.

This book is beautifully written, with sharp characterizations and a page-turning plot.