A Deep South Read

Friendship Cemetery by Adele Elliott 

I've just finished reading this novel which was one of the stories on my 'buried' kindle To Be Read pile. When I started to use my Samsung tablet at the beginning of 2014, for reading my ebooks, I got myself in a bit of a muddle. I've now got lists of ebooks in 3 different places - on my Kindle for PC; on my actual kindle and on my newish tablet. Not all books have been loaded onto all 3 devices so I'm now finding books which have inadvertantly been in storage for some time. Friendship Cemetery is one of those novels, written by a fellow Crooked cat author, which I had intended to read ages ago. 

There are others which slipped into this 'almost buried' category I'm now writing reviews for. Of course, I've not mentioned that I also have PDF versions of some novels so I'm going to have to have a good clear out of those files, too, to see which of those I've stll to read. The plan is to do all that before I restock my kindle!

Here's what I thought about Friendship Cemetery:

This was a captivating mix of a slowly revealed almost paranormal story, a light mystery and a book with local humour which travelled well worldwide. The restrictive nature of small towns like Columbus, full of cliques of ‘busy’ people who know everyone’s business, is replicated in other parts of the world but not all would be so well depicted as Adele Elliot has done in Friendship Cemetery. Though a work of fiction, I feel I learned quite a bit about the Deep South and in particular a city like Columbus, Mississippi. It’s not often a graveyard is the main setting for a novel but what we glimpse of Friendship Cemetery is just sufficient to bed the characters into place in the story. There were sufficient clues along the way for the reader to work out about the mystery of Emma Grace’s father though the denouement of why it was a mystery is harder to work out. At nineteen-ish Emma Grace seems such a sheltered ‘almost-innocent’ at the beginning and, for me, remains the same at the end. Her coterie of unusual friends are very well portrayed, none of whom initially fit the ideal that Emma’s mother has for her daughter, though if any character developed and matured in the story I believe it was Emma’s mother who did most of that. In Friendship Cemetery, there’s an interesting writing style which flows at an even pace throughout, the humour making it a very pleasant easy read. 

About Adele Elliott...

Adele Elliott is a painter and designer of fantasy tiaras. She is a New Orleans native who has been exiled in Mississippi since her home, and most of her sanity, were blown away by an evil wind named Katrina.

Adele writes an opinion column for The Commercial Dispatch. She also hosts two internet radio shows: "Dialogue", a conversation with creative people (mostly writers), and "Ask the Psychic".

She has recently finished her first novel (writing, not reading), "Friendship Cemetery", which has been released by Crooked Cat Publishing.

She lives in a big purple house with her wonderful husband, Chris Hannon, and three "children": Charlotte Ruse (the wild dingo dog), Freda Jolie (lady-dog), and Loa, a magical boy-cat.

Slainthe!