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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jul 2020, 304 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2021, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jane McCormack
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A searing debut novel that follows three generations - fractured by murder, seeking redemption - in fictional Pitchlynn, Mississippi.
An Iraq War veteran turned small-town homemaker, Colleen works hard to keep her deployment behind her―until pregnancy brings her buried trauma to the surface. She hides her mounting anxiety from her husband, Derby, who is in turn preoccupied with the retrial of his father, Hare Hobbs, for a decades-old, civil rights–era murder. Colleen and Derby's community, including the descendants of the murder victim, still grapple with the fallout; corrections officer Doc and his wife, Jessica, have built their life in the shadow of this violent act.
As a media frenzy builds, questions of Hare's guilt―and of the townsfolks' potential complicity in the crime―only magnify the ever-present tensions of class and race, tied always to the land and who can call it their own. At the center of these lingering questions is Wallis House, an antebellum estate that has recently passed to new hands. A brick-and-mortar representation of a town trying to erase its past, Wallis House is both the jewel of a gentrifying 2010s Pitchlynn, and the scene of the 1964 murder itself. When fresh violence erupts on the property grounds, the battle between old Pitchlynn and new, between memorial site and moving on, forces a reckoning and irreparable loss.
Some Go Home twists together personal and collective history, binding north Mississippi to northside Chicago, in a richly textured, explosive depiction of both the American South and our larger cultural legacy.
2
Then it was August. Sweltering, dead-grass August. She was on the couch, in a peach-colored bathrobe, third trimester. Derby had already called four times that morning; Colleen hadn't picked up, but only listened to the answering machine. He wasn't so much checking in on her as he was checking up, exercising his own anxiety. He'd been coiled extra-tight since seeing his father back in the news, as if the old man were anything more than a gust of scorched air (or as if a phone call to Colleen could protect her if he wasn't).
Instead of talking things out, Derby had doubled down on domestic regimen: check-ins, check-ons, grocery lists, chores, and reporting for daily duty at a house-flip gig in Pitchlynn.
Derby Friar, Derby Friar, his jeans forever tucked into his stiff leather ropers. Once a year, he bought a pair of tan, pull-on Red Wing work boots. He spent twelve months scuffing them, wearing them in proper . . . then bought another new pair, and started ...
At first blush, Some Go Home explores veteran Colleen Friar's acclimation back to her hometown of Pitchlynn, Mississippi following her deployment. Yet the novel also addresses the idea that home is an amalgamation of people and places, lineage and legacy. Some Go Home explores how a place can leave an indelible mark...continued
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(Reviewed by Jane McCormack).
Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Everlasting
Some Go Home reckons with blood ties, buried secrets, and the poisons of possession, reminding us that race and class sit inside each other, in permanent headlock. This is staccato realism; these sentences pop in the mouth like blackberries. 'You needed lies to make memory,' one character cautions. To make fiction you need truth, and Lindsey offers it here in crystalline quantity. Kevin Powers, National Book Award finalist and author of The Yellow Birds
Some Go Home is an extraordinary novel. It is lived-in in its particulars, told in energetic and evocative prose, and has as much insight into the peculiar ways the past informs the present as any book you're likely to encounter this year. But more than that, Odie Lindsey seems to have a notion about what all that might mean for where we're headed, and not just for those of us with some connection to the American South, but for any human being attempting to go forth in a world as strange as ours in a time as strange as this. Randall Kenan, author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
Some Go Home has the grit, power, and soul of Janis Joplin and the hardscrabble depth of Johnny Cash. Odie Lindsey brings Pitchlynn and north Mississippi to life better than anybody's business—you will recognize the landscape, the language, and the people as real…Some Go Home will have a long and happy life in the American mind. This novel is nothing short of thrilling. Tom Franklin, New York Times best-selling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
Some Go Home is both timely and timeless, its prose crackling and sparkling with energy and humor and characters who by the end are as real as the people next door. Terrific, just plain terrific.
In Some Go Home, author Odie Lindsey references then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan's "states' rights" speech as the vehicle that "had re-radicalized Hare's power, breathing life into his limp narrative." Lindsey implies that the candidate's speech allowed the fictional character Hare Hobbs to create an illusion of power for himself by working along with others to suppress the civil rights movement surrounding them. The author aptly notes that Reagan had "issued formal cover for their cause." Indeed, many white voters construed the speech, which criticized federal social initiatives such as welfare, as tacit approval of racism and classism. Reagan's bid for presidency, as well as the Republican party's desire for control, served ...
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