4. Search For Greasy Cove by Rebecca Jones

Category: 50 Books

I am going to try to be as kind as I possibly can.

This book is sort of true crime, but we have it in the biography section at the library. Probably because it’s also a memoir. The story is about how a lady and her mother try to find information about a murder that took place in Greasy Cove, AL in 1911, and to find if their greatgrandfather/grandfather was part of the murder or not.

I wanted to read the book because it was written by a local person about a local place. Apparently Greasy Cove is an old name for Gallant, AL. Gallant is right down the highway from where I live. (in fact, it’s in the same county.)

Parts of the book were really sweet. You can tell the author has a great love for her family. And she has a love for history as well. The only problem with this book is that it’s terribly written. I AM being kind. The grammatical errors and extreme overuse of exclamation points, I can mostly look over. Why? Because it looks to be self-published, and you can tell Mrs. Jones is just trying to put down a local story to paper. She’s not writing this for money.

That parts I find hard to forgive are where she quotes the Gadsden Times and there’s no quotation marks to set it apart from anything else. At the ends of the paragraphs she tells you she’s gotten it from the newspaper, but since it’s in the middle of a piece of a story, it’s unclear what you’ve just read. Where did the quotation begin? That would have been helpful.

The whole book was actually confusing. At the end she thanks her sister for proofreading it for her. I’m not sure she did proofread it. Or, if she did, maybe a better choice of proofreader would have been someone who didn’t know about the murder or the family members. It was difficult to know who she was talking about at any given time. The timeline skipped around with no warning. The author used so many pronouns at a time you had no idea who she was talking about. It was so confusing in fact, that one of my coworkers (who LOVES to read about historical things in general and historical Alabama things in particular) tried to read it and could not finish it because she was so confused. This isn’t a long book either (it’s 70 pages). You could read it in an hour. There were probably 80 points that needed clarifying. And if those had been cleared up, I would have called it a success despite the grammatical errors and spelling.

If you’re interested in local history, I’d say give this book a shot. If you can’t finish it because it’s too confusing, you’re not alone. If you do finish it and you’re still kinda, “Wait, what?” you too, are not alone.

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