A haunting, spelling-binding Southern memoir that reminds me of sticky sweet peaches and good bourbon. A delicious and mesmerizing story.

The Jones family is known in Myrtle Beach, SC, for their hotels, restaurants, and bars—catering to the tourist trade. These operations were largely owned by her grandfather, who hired sons and nephews to manage and work at them. A mean and cruel man, he kept his money for himself. Her Nana, who put up with this man for decades, encouraged Nicole’s love of stories and reading.

And that is what this book is about—growing up female in a family of brothers and uncles. Being of money, but not having money. Having a dreamer of a father and a disapproving grandfather. Mixed in with Low Country lore—ghost and pirate stories, beauty pageants, hurricanes, family businesses, moving from house to house, and overhanging medical debt.

I found this book interesting, but could not relate to most of it—especially the beauty pageants, but also the large family, hurricanes, and controlling grandfather. Memoir readers who are especially interested in any of these topics should try this book.

Low Country is an engaging memoir by J. Nicole Jones recalling a childhood in Myrtle Beach, SC that is filled with country music, pirate stories, ghosts, and a family fraught with dysfunction. She manages to capture the good, the bad, and the ugly of her family. "The South does not own tragedy, but it sure seems to have taken a liking to the region." 3.5 stars

Thank you to Catapult and NetGalley for this ARC.

There were aspects of this memoir that I really connected with, but overall it was a bit underwhelming. It was not clear to me what the primary story/purpose of this memoir was, as we bounce between family members, Southern coastal folklore (we'll get to that in a minute), and hints about Jones' eventual departure from the region without a throughline connecting the disparate chapters. I also found Jones as a character (if that's the right word to use) to be quite a passive person throughout, and I wanted more about her personal perceptions of her family members and the takeaways from the experiences she's had with them (we got a bit of that with her maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother, but I wanted more). My favorite parts by far were her incorporations of folklore from the region, including ghost stories, pirates, and hurricane lore, as the folklore of the South has always been something of interest for me. On a related note, the writing as a whole was quite beautiful and I would love to see Jones take on the fiction form or even a more self-contained personal essay.

Thank you to the author and Catapult for providing me with a free early e-copy of this work through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Low Country comes out on April 13.

In this debut, Jones writes a memoir about growing up on the coast of South Carolina complet with snakes, alligators, and hurricanes along with the ghosts. Her family does not come close to the wealth of her relatives and she talks of her heritage of being surrounded by women who were used to being used and ignored. Its an interesting story in which she shows her love for her hard-drinking father who wanted to be a country music star and her overwhelmed mother and beloved grandmother.

J. Nicole Jones presents a memoir of her family in this tale of life in South Carolina when you're the poor relations. There are some dark secrets as well as abuse in this multigenerational tale. It's rich with local atmospherics. It's difficult to review memoirs because it feels as though you are judging someone's life and life choices but that's not the case here. Jones is revealing her family's history in which she is a player, not the main focus. A little research into her turns up an essay she wrote on the subject of memoirs, which is worth a read as a companion to this volume. The writing reflects her MFA. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Sadly, this book just didn't do it for me. It was difficult to follow and I couldn't follow along enough to really love the story.

This has been memoir Monday for me. Jones talks about her childhood and early history in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She describes her grandparents, on both sides, and also the fractured relationship of her parents. It was an interesting read. I thought the most interesting people were her Nana and maternal grandfather. The author had a tendency to meander off the story, highlighting local lore, stories, amd history. While some of it was interesting, it was a detraction from the main story.

An interesting idea that had so much potential but fell short. The author skips huge chunks of the story and acknowledges doing so but never explains why.

This book is a powerful memoir in the tradition of The Glass Castle. It is not an emotionally easy read, but that's not why you pick it up. The author has a clear voice and is an excellent tour guide through her childhood. She beautifully paints her surroundings, while simultaneously giving you a clear-eyed look into her upbringing. Absolutely would recommend.

Wasn't able to read. Text didn't transfer correctly to my Kindle. Will recommend for purchase for our library.

DNF @ 50%

One of the better pieces of writing advice I’ve heard lately is that each chapter of a book should have an internal arc: a point of origin, a tension explored, and a push away from it into the next plot beat at the end. I’m sorry to say I didn’t feel this memoir followed this advice, and that the book didn’t work for me for primarily this reason. The weak structure may have been an intentional commentary—how intertwined the threads of family felt that we as readers wandered across generations without much warning or demarcation between narratives. But my, does it wander. We begin a chapter talking about the author’s parents and wind through her great grandfather’s death and the fates of some of her uncles before looping back to her grandmother again. This felt deeply muddy, and I’m afraid the lack of narrative drive didn’t engage me to the point where I procrastinated on finishing this book for more than a month and never mustered the drive to return to it. I think it was a good conceit with ineffectual execution if it was an intentional tactic, and a pretty major shortcoming of writing and editing if not.

I believe at its core that this work wanted to be semi-biographical fiction, and that abandonment of some memoir conventions has done it a disservice. Early in the book, the author elects to overly change the setting of her parents’ meeting to one that suited her the narrative better (“I’d like to pretend, though, that they met at a different bar. One that plays a more consistent role in my family’s history. … The view’s better and the drinks are stronger. Such a well-meaning and convenient move puts us closer to the Grand Strand tradition of laying claim to obscurities.”) Maybe I’m too rigid to appreciate this as an act of creative rebellion (“At least I’m being upfront with you”—cheers for not lying in your own autobiography I guess); maybe my historian’s training prevents me from being able to follow the author here. But by god if her parents met in one venue, surely that is how the story should go?

I am personally resistant to the intentional romanticization of history, even to begin a romantic story; this may be a “me” problem. But at its core, this is a story about intergenerational trauma. Why are we doing this? The book balances that exploration against that a strong sense of romanticization in general, here called “a well-meaning … claim to obscurities.” I understand this; the family stories may passed down to the author with that same romantic air, and that seems hugely worthy of exploration. But this intentional slip into the same habit creates the impression that the book as a whole had a larger romantic project in mind.

The writing, in part owing to its structural shortcomings, was flawed. I think the author has a lot of potential and that shines through in some passages. There was some grace in the flowery passages, but the words were often overtaxed, the beauty shoved into and lost within overlong paragraphs. Some language was a bit too enamoured of its own conceit. One minor example of conceit superimposing function: the author tells us that if “you want to get rich, try drinking. That is to say, other people’s drinking.” You are describing the liquor industry. A word exists for this, but the author wanted wordplay. This sort of narrative trick also contributed to the impression of a romantic project, particularly as the exposition goes on to become poetry:

“What goes around comes around, so they say, and I have wondered if affluence built on the windfall of vices has some comeuppance brewing alongside the booze. A rifle propped in the arm of the couch reaches to be picked up. Touch me. Use me. Hurt something, and if it’s only yourself, then you have done your heroic best in this life. A bottle of whiskey’s not a Winchester, but … bullets and bourbon may as well be communion wafers and the blood of Christ in the swamplands and washes of the Low Country.” (p.38)

I highlight this passage for two reasons. One is that I think it’s conceptually quite good writing when it loops around again, and I wanted to give it accolades. The other is what it achieves: “Touch me. Use me.” This is not a regular feature of memoir in my experience, and again we have to consider what the author’s intentions were. Aside from the fact that this doesn’t work as a device in this format, it does strike me as a romantic description—if not a necessarily complimentary one—of a prevailing culture of South Carolina from the author’s point of view.

Obviously this book didn’t work for me on a few different levels. My rating comes down to who I would recommend this book to: if you’re looking for meandering, richly written anecdotes loosely oriented around meditations on gendered expectations from a rich-poor white family in South Carolina, this is the book for you. I am not strictly sure there was a story worth telling here in the memoir format—but it may be worth noting, given the author’s literary flairs, that I’d have read the hell out of a ghost story with similar details.

What an inspirational book of someone who has gone through so much in life - overcome so much in their childhood and so much struggle with mental health with the family and herself. I picked up this book not really sure what to expect and was not disappointed. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

On the surface, the author seemed to have the perfect life, the child of a wealthy and well known South Carolina family famous for its hotels and restaurants. But the truth was that she was being raised by a violent grandfather and an emotionally absent father. From having everything she might want at one minute to barely having enough to eat the next, Jones lived a life of uncertainty and fear. When she believes she has uncovered a family secret about her grandmother, the woman who has been a punching back for her husband for decades, Jones is frozen with indecision about what to do. Readers will find themselves emotionally invested in Jones and her family and fascinated by the local legends and lore that she weaves into the story of her life