Boys of Alabama

Boys of Alabama is a novel by the American writer Genevieve Hudson, published in 2020. It is a first novel, and it sets a story about a boy fitting into a new country beside a story about what a place asks of the people who arrive in it.

Max has come from Germany to a town in Alabama with his parents, who find the local nostalgia for the past difficult to interpret. Max does not. He is taken into the football team, learns to throw and to shoot, and is welcomed into a world of basement drinking and locker-room talk that he only half understands, while keeping quiet about what he is and about what he can do.

He meets Pan in physics class, a boy in black with a goth choker who is known in the school as a witch, and finds in him the first person by whom he feels properly seen. The two of them begin a relationship in which Max describes his abilities and Pan describes the snake-handling rituals of a local church, and the novel follows them as each of them tries to work out how much of himself he can afford to keep.