Boys of Alabama

March 2, 2020
In Hudson’s luminous debut novel (after the collection Pretend We Live Here), a German teenager with a supernatural power moves to Delilah, Ala., with his parents. Max delightfully takes in the “exotic” sights— rivers “rushing like arteries cut open across the earth”; a Confederate flag flying from a truck. Despite Max’s mother’s unease, Max adjusts easily to his new life by joining the high school football team, though the homophobic culture causes him to question his burgeoning feelings for his friend Pan, a goth outsider from school. Max reveals his power of resurrection to Pan by reanimating a dead squirrel. After Max gets caught up in a fervent evangelical group led by a man known around town as the Judge, his parents weigh their concern about his involvement with the Judge against their support for his efforts to find himself. (“The Judge man called his supporters a Christian army,” his mother exclaims to his father. “He’s trying to draft our son!”) After Pan tells Max about the dark side of the Judge’s evangelism, it pushes him to help resurrect people who can speak the truth about the Judge, putting both Max and Pan in danger. While the conclusion feels rushed, leveraging the characters’ strong bond in service of a melodramatic climax, Hudson writes tenderly about cultural displacement, toxic masculinity, and friendship. This complex tale achieves a startling variation on the theme of teenage rebellion.

March 15, 2020
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education. Max is gifted, but if you're thinking "honors student," think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story's suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn't a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max's gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max's father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max's parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max's power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who's running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge's real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote's and McCullers' depictions of queerness were so occluded. A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.

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April 1, 2020

DEBUT Because of the need for fiction about queer love in the conservative evangelical South, this debut novel feels necessary. Unfortunately, it is not a good book. Positioned as a Southern gothic with a dash of magical realism, it relies on short, choppy sentences and overly descriptive passages exhibiting language that's overwrought, florid, discordant, and distracting. Max, a gay German teenager with magical powers, moves with his atheist parents to Alabama, where he joins the football team at his new Christian school. There, he meets and falls in love with Pan, a goth genderqueer student. Still, Max appears to be more interested in the Judge, a local evangelical politician who looms over the town and is more trope than fully developed character, and Max's Germanness seems to exist solely to allow stereotypes to stand in for character development. Max's parents are also irrelevant, hastily sketched background characters. VERDICT Because Max is unfamiliar with the U.S. South, his experiences are described using clich�s meant to represent the town's views on gays, god, football, and liberals, with results that are both unrevealing and off-putting. Not recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/4/19.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2020
Debut novelist Hudson sets her unique coming-of-age tale in a hot, swampy Alabama steeped in football and God. Here we find teenage Max and his parents, who have newly arrived from Germany. A fast runner, Max is taken in by the football team and the church that comes with it?something his atheist mother is especially unhappy about. Though the other boys at first refer to him as Nazi, Max finds previously unknown camaraderie. Uneasy but thrilled with his newfound friendships, and muscles, Max guards two secrets: a mysterious and supernatural power, and his love for his childhood friend Nils. When he meets Pan, a dress-wearing goth that the other boys refer to as the local witch, those hidden feelings are brought to the fore, and Max must navigate between his two worlds. As this tension escalates, the novel's tone becomes foreboding?but the ending is still a shocker. This is a little southern gothic, a little supernatural, and a little reminiscent of Wiley Cash's suspensful A Land More Kind than Home (2012).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)