Road Tripping Across the USA Mini Reading Challenge: Arkansas

An amusing, charming lesbian romance about finding unexpected love inside family expectations.

When Fiona Ng’s best friend, Michael, needs a pretend girlfriend to bring home for Christmas in Arkansas, Fiona girds her loins and steps up. Besides, how hard could one festive family weekend be, anyway? That’s before she meets the boisterous McElroy clan, with accents as thick as a homemade pie crust, and an endless supply of competitive siblings, including Lizzie, Michael’s beautiful younger sister.

At turns haunting and breathtaking, Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves explores legacies of love, family, and the ghostly imprint grief leaves behind as three women face the past to bring light to an old Southern town lost deep beneath the surface.

Years ago, yellow fever gripped the small lakeside town of Prosper, Arkansas. At the height of that summer swelter, in the wake of an unexpected storm, the dam failed and the valley flooded—drowning the town and everyone trapped inside.

The secrets of old Prosper drowned with them.

Now, decades later, when a mysterious locked box is pulled from the depths of the lake, three descendants of that long-ago tragedy are hurled into another feverish summer.

As impossible fires bloom through their slowly decaying Southern town, two sisters must reckon with the ghosts of a land that refuses to be forgotten.

In a small southern pecan town, the annual harvest is a time of both celebration and heartbreak. Even as families are forced to sell their orchards and move away, Lil Clearwater, keeper of a secret covenant with her land, swears she never will. When her twin Sasha returns to the dwindling town in hopes of reconnecting with the girl her heart never forgot, the sisters struggle to bridge their differences and share the immense burden of protecting their home from hungry forces intent on uprooting everything they love.

From the author of Real Bad Things and Cottonmouths, a Los Angeles Review Best Book of 2017, comes the darkly suspenseful tale of a small-town Easter tradition and its murderous secrets.

For seventeen years, a serial murderer has used the Presley, Arkansas, Annual Hunt for the Golden Egg to find prey. Or at least that’s what some people believe. Others, like the town’s devoted “Eggheads,” relish the tradition and think the deaths are just unfortunate accidents. But for Nell Holcomb, the town’s annual Hunt dredges up a particularly painful memory: her brother’s death, long believed to be “the Hunter’s” first kill.

This was Drear’s Bluff. Nothing bad happened here. People didn’t disappear.

Echoing the work of authors like Daniel Woodrell and Sarah Waters, Cottonmouths is an unflinching story about the ways in which the past pulls us back . . . despite our best efforts to leave it behind.

From a compelling new voice in LGBTQ and Southern fiction, a gripping tale of crime and desire amid small-town America’s meth epidemic.

From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.

It’s 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie’s starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue.

Mysterious, beautiful women with secrets are to be avoided.

Leanne Dresher knows it with her head, but her heart has other plans.

It’s that wonderful time of the year in Christmas, Arkansas, when tourists descend and the little town’s Winter Wonderland Festival pays everyone’s bills through the rest of the long winter. Lee Dresher’s art gallery will soon be swamped with consignments and bargain-hunting out-of-towners. What makes this season unlike all the others before it? Newcomer Becka James, whose pain-filled eyes speak of a loss she won’t put into words.

The responsible one. The steady, reliable one. Lauren Roberts has had her fill of it.

Running her bed-and-breakfast like clockwork and hosting her younger, glamorous, songbird sister for the holidays only underscores Lauren’s choice of order over risk. Kelly’s vibrant and impetuous nature doesn’t stick to anything–or any one woman–for long. That includes an old girlfriend of Lauren’s who was dazzled by Kelly, then dumped, shortly after Lauren stepped aside.

After hitting the big time with her most recent novel, Lucy Anderson’s ready for her next challenge.

On the heels of her successful book tour, Lucy’s old high school friend Chelle Morrison calls her with a proposal: Lucy should buy the beautiful historic Crafton House and turn it into a writer’s retreat. Little River, Arkansas is on the cusp of revitalization, and they hope the retreat will bring new life to the struggling town.

They say never meet your idols. But nothing about digging up their deepest secrets.

Told in alternating perspectives, Every Time You Hear That Song is a beautiful tale told across lifetimes. There’s more to Decklee’s story that Darren ever could have guessed, but the real story she has to tell is her own.

Perfect for fans of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six, this queer coming-of-age story celebrates country music, complicated women, and living authentically.

Arkansas and the Queer South

Thompson goes on to describe several lesbian communities established in the Ozark Mountains during the sixties and seventies and offers a substantial account of Eureka Springs’s informal status as the “gay capital of the Ozarks.” Through this exploration of identity formation, group articulation, political mobilization, and cultural visibility within the context of historical episodes such as the Second World War, the civil rights movement, and the AIDS epidemic, The Un-Natural State contributes not only to our understanding of gay and lesbian history but also to our understanding of the South.