One Mississippi is a coming-of-age story, and it employs many of the usual vehicles for carrying a boy into manhood: the beautiful girl, the troubled best friend, the drama of crimes and misdemeanors that bears the hero abruptly onto the harshly lit stage of adult consequence. Childress, who has become a venerated chronicler of life in the American South -- many readers will know him from Crazy in Alabama, which was made into a movie starring Melanie Griffith -- both evokes the swampy, backward, dark side of the gothic Deep South in One Mississippi , and deploys the friendlier chestnuts of Southern fiction: the eccentrics, the camp humor, the vulnerability and sincerity of well-intentioned, unsophisticated people. Childress works it all in here: the heat, the kudzu, the UFO sightings, simmering racial animosity, appalling Baptist musicals based on the life of Jesus, the Dairy Dog, ramshackle poverty. (The Washington Post)