Hardcover (Jan 2017), 320 pages.
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion.
BookBrowse Rating: 5/5, Critics' Consensus:  5/5
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Review and article by Donna Chavez

Review: Robin Roe has written one helluva young adult debut novel. Alternating first person narratives by a couple of adolescent boys striving to be and do the right thing in a world seemingly ill-suited to their needs feels all too familiar. And Roe's professional experience as a former counselor imbues the story with jarring grimness, taking an unblinking, behind-the-headlines look at child abuse.... While A List of Cages is a young adult book, I highly recommend it for adults who work with young people to see how easily children who have no vocabulary for their abusive situations can so easily fall between the cracks of child welfare services.  ... continued

Every time we review a book we also explore a related topic. Here is a recent "beyond the book" article, written by Gary Presley, for Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller

Mary Miller's Always Happy Hour is set in the south, but many will see it as something other than true southern fiction. The protagonists are too internalized, too walled off from the southerness - the land, the people, the ethos of pride, racial discord, and defeat - that is the beating heart of most great southern fiction; that is to say the forces that drive everything from regional pride to politics to art. More typical southern writers touch on some if not all of those forces, and create such a palpable sense of place that their works become universal.

Mississippian William Faulkner, a Nobel Prize winner, is one such writer. He might well have written his fiction in the blood of his ancestors. However, Faulkner was also a modernist, experimenting with different literary styles; English Professor Joseph C. Murphy described his As I Lay Dying as "a short aesthetic tour-de-force." Turn to Flannery O'Conner, her most famous work the novella A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a prime example of a writer attuned to religion, tragedy, violence, and the meaning and place of the disfigured or damaged in our world. In A Catholic Thinker, Tod Worner notes, "The work of Flannery O'Connor could be harsh, violent and discomfiting. And yet it is also thick with truth, grace and redemption." Can that truth be found only in southern literature? No, of course not, but O'Connor's work was fully informed by her Catholicism, an outlier religion in many parts of the south.
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