The Gods of Green County by Mary Elizabeth Pope is a 2021 Blair publication.

In depression era Arkansas, a young man is shot and killed by the local sheriff who claims it was self-defense. He hires an up-and-coming lawyer to defend him. But, when the attorney looks at the evidence, he discovers some gaping holes in the Sheriff’s story…

When I started reading this book, I thought perhaps I had misunderstood the year the book was published. Perhaps this was a reissue? But nope- this book was indeed published for the first time in 2021. I had no idea there were people out there writing books of this caliber anymore. I am duly impressed!

Although the book was occasionally to pat- things coming together just a bit too conveniently, the story is simply too good to hold that angainst it.

Yes, this book does have a mystery- not really a whodunit- because that part is made clear right away- but the whole story behind what prompted this crime slowly unfolds throughout the course of the book. While all the answers we crave are eventually brought to light- this is only one part of the story.

Ultimately, at least in my opinion, this is a story about good, but flawed people, looking for justice, hoping to right wrongs- it’s about their mistakes, guilt, and regrets, it’s about atonement, redemption, and about forgiveness in the wake of unbearable tragedy. This book might break your heart at times but have no fear- before you turn that last page, your heart will be on the mend- warmed, and filled with peace.

This is one of the best books I’ve read in ages and ages. I really wish authors would go back to telling good stories like this one- ones that will stick with you for the ages- the kind that become ‘classics’ someday- as this one should!

5 stars ( )

One hot day in 1926, the sheriff shoots Buddy Harper to death in Paradise, Arkansas, and claims self-defense. Since the sheriff practically runs Green County, and since a raft of witnesses testifies that Buddy threatened him with a crowbar, acquittal seems certain. Nevertheless, the attorney the sheriff has hired to defend him, Leroy Harrison, nearly withdraws from the case. His client, though smoother than silk, seems utterly unscrupulous, and it’s suspicious how the witnesses’ statements tally so closely in wording.

However, Leroy keeps the case in the end. His wife has just had another miscarriage, the great pain of their lives together, and he can’t handle the turmoil that would surely result if he disappointed the sheriff. But there are compensations, for subsequently, Leroy’s elected judge. And that’s part of his problem, for his conscience tells him that’s wrong, especially when he sees how the sheriff wields power, in ways both petty and devastating.

Nobody suffers more than Coralee Wilkins (née Harper), who sees visions of her late brother on the street, her porch, and the grocery. To her husband, Earl’s, dismay, she becomes more religious as a means of coping. The preacher she chooses is a corrupt, money-grubbing type who encourages his congregants to handle poisonous snakes.

The symbolism here might be heavy-handed: the snake in Paradise. But Pope has re-created a dirt-poor cotton town, with its intricate links forged through lifelong relationships and resentments. The result is a terrific story, a moral tale about power, loyalties, mental disturbance, and corruption. Although I dislike her intended conclusion, she brings her decidedly imperfect folk to life, and it’s a loving portrait she portrays of a time and place gone by.

Told through three different voices — Leroy’s, Coralee’s, and Earl’s — the narrative opens with one of Coralee’s psychotic delusions. Earl, who works for a pittance at a cotton gin, doesn’t know what to do, as Coralee’s illness progresses and her behavior endangers herself and others. He’s a good soul, the salt of the earth, and illiterate, as she is. It’s a poignant portrayal, and you feel for both of them. Reversals propel the story, as every move the three narrators make backfires. This small town, where everyone’s known each other forever, has its staunch loyalties that help people get through but also its hatreds and suspicions.

However, the one hatred Paradise lacks is racial. No Black characters live or work here, apparently, nor do any of the three narrators even refer to Blacks. The omission, though it simplifies the storytelling and allows the focus to remain on the principals’ concerns, makes me wonder why Pope chose that approach. I hope it’s not to protect her characters, so they don’t seem “dislikable.”

Several crucial scenes take place in a bar, and that too tests belief — not in the latter part of the novel, which occurs twenty years and more after the shooting, but in 1926, when Prohibition ruled the land. Along the same lines, somehow World War II escapes notice or mention, which gives the impression that Paradise must be hermetically sealed.

Finally, the narrative takes a couple too many twists in its latter stages, not always believably. And I think Pope wants the reader to see Leroy, who can’t leave the shooting or the sheriff’s abuses of power alone, as the villain here. He’s a whistleblower who neglects his family, yes, and not all his reasons for pursuing his cause are altruistic. But should he really leave well enough alone? And as the only character who stands up to evil, he has my admiration — especially if the alternative is just to keep his head down and tend his own garden. ( )

The Gods of Green County being my first fiction of 2022, it made me fall in love with novels once again. Powerfully written, vibrant and tempered with nuance it is a picturesque narration of life's intangible coincidences which are aptly summarized by the following advice: 'don't seek meaning in things as they happen. Await the final outcome to learn why they happened.'

The central protagonist Coralee Harper lives in 1920's Paradise, rural Arkansas, beset by poverty and psychological afflictions. Her brother Buddy's demise at the hands of the local Sheriff in a botched robbery triggers hallucinations which become more powerful when she marries for the second time and has a son.

A few miles away resides lawyer Leroy Harrison who fought to exonerate the Sheriff accused of callously slaying Buddy without cause. Successful, he becomes the Sheriff's most vaunted friend and receives a seemingly gratuitous promotion to Judgehood in his local county. Plagued by multiple miscarriages, he finally adopts his widowed brother's unwanted son Caleb.

Meet Earl; Coralee's second husband who is fearful of his wife's hyper-religious zealotry fed by a snake-wielding pastor and a retinue of equally bloodthirsty congregations. Earl's attempts at having his wife committed to a mental sanitarium for treatment sees him cross paths with Harrison who, contrary to his earlier decision, rescinds his judgement of Coralee being sane and has her committed.

But Harrison's doubts plague him. Gnawing at him until even the Sheriff, his greatest patron, turns against him. Was Buddy Harper truly a criminal or a victim of a deep-rooted conspiracy hatched to silence him? And did he, Harrison, unerringly betray Coralee and exacerbate her inner turmoil by fighting for the wrong cause almost three decades ago? And could the key to solving Buddy's untimely death be held by a mysterious mute boy whose very existence is another mystery?

Set against the backdrop of rural Arkansas during the great depression, The Gods of Green County is fiction at its most powerful and Pope at her greatest. The imagery and the narrative proliferating it are the key pivots on which this story turns. An epochal novel and one of American fiction's greatest. ( )