Not in This World

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Cameron Trepp

Jane Scott Stuart made a promise to a man named Paul. She kept it decades later, on a wicked winter morning in northeast Scotland, when the driving snow rattled her windows and she finally sat down to write the story she had been carrying all those years. The result, co-written with Dallas Morning News bestselling author Elaine Flowers, is one of those rare novels that earns the word landmark without apology.

Not in This World begins in the segregated small town of Horse Cave, Kentucky, in the 1930s, where Paul Carew, a young Black man caught in an act of private vulnerability by his Baptist preacher father, finds himself on a path that will change everything. The white child at the center of the bond that forms between them gives the story its particular emotional architecture, two people whose dependence on each other was, in the world they inhabited, simply not supposed to exist. That the world kept trying to make it impossible is the engine of the entire novel.

What makes the book genuinely extraordinary beyond its historical sweep is that these were real people. The town is real. The bond was real. Readers who know Horse Cave describe the reading experience as stepping back in time into a living history they recognize, and readers who have never heard of it describe it as a world so vividly rendered they feel they have lived there. That dual effect is the mark of historical fiction done at its highest level.

The comparison that keeps surfacing in reviews is To Kill a Mockingbird, and while it is apt in terms of period and place and the moral weight of the central relationship, Not in This World has something even more powerful underneath it: the knowledge that this actually happened. That Paul and the child were real. That their bond survived things that should have broken it.

For anyone who believes that the most important stories are the ones that almost didn't get told, this book is proof of why keeping a promise matters.

About the Author

Jane Scott Stuart

Jane Scott Stuart was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, and spent her earliest years in her grandmother's kitchen in Horse Cave, Kentucky - the quiet, segregated world that would later form the heart of Not In This World, and later Deep White Pockets. An avid reader from the age of three, she grew up with stories woven into every corner of her life. 

Jane went on to live on four continents - Sweden, Canada, New York, Tahiti, London, Provence, and Northern Scotland - absorbing the textures of each place and carrying them into her writing. She was educated at Holton Arms (Washington, D.C.) Hollins College (Virginia), and McGill University (Montreal), where she met the man who became her husband: the youngest son of a Scottish Earl, now her literary critic and beloved companion of more than seventy years.

About the Author

Elaine Flowers

Elaine Flowers is a Dallas Morning News bestselling author of, "Black Beauty" (2004), and "It's Morning: Torn Lovers and Their Stories" (2008), "I Wouldn't Mind Having A Husband, I Just Don't Want to Be Somebody's Wife" (2010), "Broken Appointments" (2011) sequel to Black Beauty, "So... How Was Your Date?" (2016). 

From Elaine: "Fiction is my first love! I enjoy creating characters, places, and situations. It is my hope that if I enjoy reading my stories then my readers will too. I don't even mind when I make readers angry with something that happens in one of my books because I love to provoke emotions. I hope I can continue to bring you more and that you will continue to enjoy my work. Thanks for the support!"

If you would like more information on Elaine Flowers, her books, or to view book trailers, visit www.booksbyelaineflowers.com.