Mississippi Books: Novels Set in the Magnolia State

Book Summary

When journalist Hannah has to move from Chicago to a small town in Mississippi to care for her grandmother, she’s also recovering from losses in her life. She starts working for the tiny local paper, and there she uncovers a series of letters the newspaper office received from one woman in the 1930s, but never printed.

With the encouragement of a local teacher, Hannah begins investigating the letters and, along with them, the town’s long-buried secrets.

Book Summary

Set in the Greek system at Ole Miss, Rush is told from three alternating points of view. Cali is a college freshman with the grades, personality, and extracurriculars to get into a sorority- but without the important pedigree needed in the Southern Greek system. Wilda is the helicopter mom of Cali’s new BFF, another prospective sorority candidate. Miss Pearl has been the housekeeper in the sorority house for twenty-five years.

Mom Wilda has recently been invited to the Rush Advisory Board, but has no idea that the woman who invited her, Lilith, has an ulterior motive. While Lilith gave Wilda an opportunity, she’s also just crushed a promotion for the beloved Miss Pearl. When Wilda and the girls find out, they devise a plan to change Alpha Delta Beta—and maybe the entire Greek system—forever.

Book Summary

Jim Crow laws ruled Mississippi in the summer of 1964, and three innocent men had just been brutally murdered for trying to help Black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Twenty-two-year-old Violet has also just been the victim of a heinous attack and killed the man responsible. But she knows she’ll be blamed, so she runs from Jackson.

Violet’s sister, Marigold, works for the Mississippi Summer Project, which advocates for Black voting rights. Marigold hoped to attend law school, but a pregnancy changed her plans. She now heads North, hoping to raise her baby outside of segregated Mississippi.

While the sisters leave Jackson for their own reasons, they don’t realize that one man is pursuing them both for his own dark secrets.

Book Summary

Starla is only 9 years old when she makes a series of decisions that change her life overnight. It’s 1963, and she lives with her strict grandmother in Mississippi. Despite being grounded, Starla sneaks out to see the annual 4th of July parade. When she’s caught, she believes her grandmother’s threats of reform school and sneaks out again with the intention of finding her mom all the way in Nashville. 

Starla is offered a ride from a black woman, Eula, traveling with a white baby, quite a controversial scene in the 1963 South. Their journey is full of adventures, sometimes dangerous, and long chats that help Starla redefine family and understand more about the world she lives in.

Book Summary

In this 1960s coming-of-age story, Ella is eleven years old and lives in segregated Ricksville, Mississippi. While her Ma and Ma’s lover Leroy find the smart Ella to be a nuisance, she ignores them and focuses on her love of God, Mr. Macabe, and Nate, the tough owner of the local diner.

One day, Ms. St. James, a well-to-do White woman, appears looking for Ella. No one understands why she is looking for the girl. Yet the unlikely duo forms a deep bond. While the rest of the community hopes Ms. St. James will disappear and not return, Ella will do anything to keep her coming back.

Ella and Ms. St. James each have secrets, and the consequences are devastating when they are revealed.

Book Summary

Every fifteen years, the Slocumb family experiences something life-changing. For the last three generations, it’s been unexpected pregnancies. Matriarch Ginny(aka “Big”) is now 45, her daughter Liza is 30, and Liza’s daughter, Mosey, is now 15.

Liza has just suffered a stroke, and all three generations are just trying to hold things together. Mosey has no interest in following in their shoes and having a baby at 15. The lives of all three generations are turned upside down when Ginny has a willow tree removed from the backyard. Under the tree, a small grave filled with the bones of a baby, a blanket, a dress, and a baby toy is uncovered. But who was the baby, and how did it end up in Ginny’s backyard?

Book Summary

Miss An’gel and Miss Dickce Ducote are snoopy sisters, always ready to lend a hand in their small town of Athena, Mississippi. They’re pet-sitting for their friend’s cat when their former sorority sister, the socialite Rosabelle Sultan, shows up on the doorstep with her adult children trailing her.

Rosabelle’s selfish kids are desperate to uncover the terms of her will, and it’s soon clear that at least one of them is willing to murder her for their inheritance. The sisters must use all their Southern charm to untangle all the possible suspects.

Book Summary

In this poetically written debut novel, Isaiah and Samuel are enslaved on the Halifax cotton plantation. They fall deeply in love and find hope in each other despite their harsh lives with vicious masters.

When an older fellow slave begins preaching the master’s gospel, hoping to gain favor, the enslaved community begins turning on each other rather than coming together. Isisah and Samuel soon become a target.

Book Summary

Set in 1927 in the tiny town of Hobnob, Mississippi, this book tells the story of two federal agents arriving in town to investigate the disappearance of two other agents who had been chasing a bootlegger. At a crime scene, they discover an abandoned baby boy, and Agent Ingersoll is determined to find the boy a good home, as he was also an orphan. 

A new challenge arises amid their search for the bootleggers, other agents, and a home for the boy. The banks of the Mississippi River are rising and threatening the town. 

Book Summary

Skeeter has returned home from college to her family’s cotton plantation, where, despite trying to act like a proper Southern lady, she seems to constantly disappoint her mother. 

Her true ambition, however, is to be a writer. The only job she’s able to find is one she is completely unqualified for – writing a housekeeping advice column for the local paper. Having virtually no experience of her own with housekeeping, Skeeter turns to her friend’s maid, the very poised Aibileen, for help. 

As she gets to know Aibileen and Aibileen’s friend, the very sassy Minny, more intimately, Skeeter is inspired to help tell their stories. She pitches the idea to write the narratives of 12 Black maids, which is a very risky project for all of them.

Book Summary

While many associate Biloxi with beach resorts and seafood, it has a darker past of mobsters running prostitution, illegal gambling, and bootleg alcohol. In this legal thriller, childhood friends Keith and Hugh grew up in Biloxi in the 1960s. The former Little League stars then drifted apart as teenagers.

Keith’s father was a prosecutor on a mission to “clean up the coast.” Meanwhile, Hugh’s father was high-ranking in the underground criminal world. Both boys followed their father’s footsteps, with Keith becoming a lawyer and Hugh running his father’s nightclubs. Eventually, their divergent paths will circle back together in the courtroom.

Book Summary

Sisters Eva(45) and Bitsy(48) grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, surrounded by literary history and their mother’s stunning perennial gardens. Bitsy was the cheerleader and homecoming queen who went on to marry a wealthy investment banker. Eva was the one always blamed when things went wrong. For example, the garden shed fire when she was eleven, which changed everything.

As soon as she was old enough, Eva ran far away from Oxford, subverting expectations that she’d attend Ole Miss and instead moving to Arizona. She becomes a successful advertising executive and a yoga instructor, but at 45, she’s still alone.

When she receives a phone call from her father insisting that she return to Mississippi for her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, she really can’t afford the time away from work, but she also can’t say no to her dad. 

Will reuniting with her sister after all these years finally give them a chance to make amends? She’s surprised to find that seeing Oxford through the eyes of an adult really does feel like going “home”.

Book Summary

In this 2017 National Book Award winner, you’ll be transported through Mississippi’s past and present. Magical realism is in full effect in this literary fiction novel. The story is told from multiple perspectives, including that of a ghost.

Jojo lives with his grandparents and toddler sister, with their drug-addicted mother making occasional appearances in their lives. Their grandmother, Mam, is dying of cancer, leaving their grandfather, Pop, to run the household. When Jojo’s white father is released from prison, Leonie picks up the children and heads out on a dangerous road trip to Parchman Farm (a notorious, real Mississippi prison).

Book Summary

Ada comes from a hard life on the swamp, and Matilda is a sharecropper’s daughter. So it wasn’t likely for these teenage girls to end up connected through a murder. 

Set in the 1920s Mississippi bayou, you’ll follow the teens deep into the world of bootleggers and corruption as they try to stay safe and come to terms with their complex past.

Book Summary

On the evening of April 5, 1936, a tornado ripped through Tupelo, Mississippi, which was already suffering at the height of the Great Depression. More than 200 people were killed, with the exact numbers unknown because Black citizens made up ⅓ of the Tupelo population, but were not counted in casualty figures. 

Dovey, a Black grandmother, barely survived being thrown into a lake by the winds. As she tries to make her way home through the destroyed streets, she stops at the home of the despised McNabb family and finds a White teenager, Jo, with a terrible head wound. 

Over the next few hours, Dovey and Jo struggle to navigate the town and the demons that connect them. The story is said to be a reminder of the power and promise that come when we reconnect.

Book Summary

This is the remarkable true story of Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr., one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen pilots who experienced air combat during World War II. 

Soaring to Glory recounts the bravery and heroics of Stewart’s combat missions, as well as the cruel injustices that Stewart and his fellow Tuskegee Airmen faced during their wartime service and when they returned home after the war.