South of Resurrection

The strengths of Jonis Agee as a novelist, her precise observations, her attention to small details, and her complicated, well drawn characters, shine through in this novel. Like "Sweet Eyes," her first novel, "South of Resurrection" peels through the layers of a small town to get at some basic human truths. Agee is particularly effective at portraying a landscape and the people who live on it. Her protagonist, Moline Bedwell, tears through the novel with the past chasing her. The inevitable collision of the past with her return to her home town fulfills the promise of the opening pages.