I only acquire a few novels every year, so they have to immediately captivate me. Within a few pages of reading Red Clay Suzie, I was in the rural South, feeling the protagonist’s confusion and pain as an outsider. This book deserves critical praise akin to that given to other classic American fiction.
Jeffrey Dale Lofton writes movingly about isolation and a young gay man’s hunger to connect. Red Clay Suzie offers a lesson in what it takes to thrive in a world that’s intent on building fences, and it does so with affection and sweetness and a belief that the deepest change is not only possible, but […]
This is much more than a deeply moving story well told by a unique, new voice in Southern literature. It is a lyrical, poetic, and layered work of highest literary art. Red Clay Suzie belongs in the high school English syllabus.
Jeffrey Dale Lofton is a writer’s writer whose strong, authorial voice captures your imagination with an unshakable grip.
If you’ve never set foot on the red-clay soil of Georgia, the heartfelt prose of Jeffrey Dale Lofton’s Red Clay Suzie will take you there. This book is an intimate exploration of people, place, and identity, one that through its honesty – as well as colorful language and vivid description – opens up the idea […]
Red Clay Suzie’s Philbet Lawson joins Scout Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird) and Frankie Addams (The Member of the Wedding) in Southern literature’s pantheon of outsider children. Read Red Clay Suzie and cheer on Philbet, a new literary hero.
From a new, pitch-perfect, Southern voice, a story so close to the heart you can almost hear it beating.
Make a glass of sweet tea, pull up a porch chair, and a cloth to mop your brow. Red Clay Suzie roots readers in the pacing of the South as Lofton coaxes his people from the heat and the rain and the gardens and the cars. It is a journey of refuge and emergence – […]