Beth Ann Fennelly

The Tilted Word is written by husband and wife team, author Tom Franklin and poet Beth Ann Fennelly. Set during the catastrophic 1927 flooding of the Mississippi this is a beautifully written story that includes murder, bootlegging and unexpected love.

Revenuers Ted Ingersoll and Ham Johnson arrive in Hobnob Landing with a mission to locate the local bootlegger and the murderer of the missing two revenuers that were last known to be in Hobnob. On the way, they unexpectedly find an abandoned show more baby at a crime scene. While Ham travels on, Ingersoll takes the baby and tries to find a family for him. He ends up coming on to Hobnob and placing the baby with Dixie Clay Holliver, little knowing that she is married to the bootlegger that they are searching for. On her part, Dixie Clay is living a life of mourning and regret. Mourning the baby she lost and regret over her marriage to the slimy, corrupt Jesse. Dixie falls in love with her new baby and she and Ingersoll bond over their concern and caring of the infant. While the romance is slow and gentle, both the tension and the river continue to rise.

The Tilted World is a gripping story and one in which the reader cannot help but root for Dixie Clay and Ingersoll to not only find each other, but save the baby and themselves from the devastating flood. Considering that there were two authors, the story is smoothly knit together and 1927 rural Mississippi comes alive on these pages. show less

The Tilted World is a collaborative effort between Tom Franklin, the masterful author of [b:Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter|7948230|Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter|Tom Franklin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1292689648s/7948230.jpg|11552215], and his wife Beth Ann Fennelly. The plot plays out against the backdrop of the 1927 Great Flood of the Mississippi River, in which 27,000 miles were inundated and hundreds of lives were lost.

Dixie Clay (okay, I admit that I loved that name) is a show more bootlegger. She distills the best hooch in the state while her charming husband, Jesse, conducts PR and sells. Ingersoll is a veteran of the Great War who has drifted into being a top-notch revenuer. Dixie Clay’s still is the one he is especially tasked to find and she is the key to finding out what happened to the last two revenuers sent to Hobnob to investigate. Ingersoll and Dixie Clay ought to be automatic enemies, but there is the matter of the husband who is the definition of bad and a baby whose welfare becomes a priority for them both.

The characters are well-drawn, and there are moments of brilliant writing with a plot that makes you smile and grimace in equal shares. But, the bad guy is just a little too senselessly bad. I know greed and ambition can make monsters, but this was a little over-the-top. The end was just a little too neatly tied for my tastes and totally lacked surprises. And, try to imagine finding one individual, of whom you had no idea of their whereabouts, at the height of the Katrina floods. The proverbial needle in the haystack. Sorry, but it would not be easy or quick.

So, a book that felt like a 4.5 star read three-quarters of the way in, turned out to be just a 3.0 by the end. It bears saying that Tom Franklin can write amazing books. Both [b:Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter|7948230|Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter|Tom Franklin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1292689648s/7948230.jpg|11552215] and [b:Hell at the Breech|214340|Hell at the Breech|Tom Franklin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1332556246s/214340.jpg|207505] were raw and realistic and moving. Both had much deeper issues being explored and both left me wanting more. I failed to find any deeper issues to contemplate here, which might account for why I felt disappointed when I closed the cover on this one. show less

As the Great Flood of 1927 threatens the Mississippi Delta, Prohibition agents Ted Ingersoll and Ham Johnson arrive in the town of Hobnob, Mississippi searching for a pair of agents who have gone missing. What they find instead are the remains of a robbery gone bad and an abandoned baby. Determined to find a home for the child, Ingersoll is told to take him to Dixie Clay Holliver, a local woman still grieving the loss of her own son. Though Dixie Clay and the agent feel an immediate show more connection, Ingersoll will soon discover he's stumbled upon the best bootlegger in the county and her increasingly dangerous husband.

Co-written novels can easily become peppered with disjointed phrases and jarring plot holes, making the venture a risky one. But husband and wife team Franklin and Fennelly combine both their storytelling and their vastly different styles to make The Titled World a gorgeous blend of grit and tenderness.

Much of the novel's balance seems to come from the fact that, while the story centers on one male and one female character, neither is held down by the gender stereotypes of their time. Much of Ingersoll's story focuses on his paternal instinct toward the child he finds, while Dixie Clay takes on a typically male role of moonshining and begins questioning her early marriage.

From two treasures of writing, The Tilted World is a gripping snapshot of American history sure to please long time fans and new readers alike.

Blog: www.rivercityreading.com show less

OK, a little bit of real talk here. $23.00 for a slender, little, less than 100 pages of text, hard cover book of "micro-memoirs"? What insanity is this? Surely this is a ridiculous price for something so physically insubstantial, right? I mean, the book, even with the bulk of the hard cover, is but the size of a paperback and with those few pages, well... And yet in my usual inimitable fashion, I ignored the price and bought it anyway. I can say that it was worth every penny. I read aloud show more from it to people I was with the weekend I bought it and raved with an unseemly enthusiasm, even to people who clearly wished me to stuff a sock in it already. Mississippi state poet laureate Beth Ann Fennelly's Heating and Cooling, a collection of "micro-memoirs," tiny memoirs akin to short stories or flash fiction, is funny and thoughtful, real and subtle, surprising and economical. She shares insights into her life in childhood and as an adult, into her marriage, into her parenting, and into memory, and she manages to do it in fewer words than I'm likely to use in this review.

Each micro-memoir is a short, tiny jewel, self-contained and complete within itself but a vital part of the whole. The book is not arranged chronologically and each piece runs from one sentence to no more than five pages. Fennelly's prose is spare and succinct and each word and idea are carefully considered with perfect turns of phrase. The book is deceptively simple, each instance building on the previous one, until the full impact of the memoir hits you. Some of the pieces are delightful, full of joy and love, and some are disturbing, telling of terrible, hidden things. My personal favorite will have me checking page 50 in all of my books for a long time to come. Bit by glorious bit each brief part reveals something more about Fennelly and about the experiences in life that have made her who she is. I couldn't stop turning the pages even as I willed myself to slow down and savor the writing. In the blink of an eye I'd come to the end of this magnificent, intimate book wishing that Fennelly lived next door to me so we could be friends. Read it. You won't be sorry. show less