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Jodi Lea Stewart is a fiction author who centers her themes on triumph over adversity with grit, humor, and stubborn tenacity. Her writing reflects her life beginning in Texas, relocating as a youngster to an Arizona cattle ranch next door to the Navajo and White Mountain Apache Nations, and as a young adult, resuming in her native Texas. Growing up, she climbed petroglyph-etched boulders, sang to chickens, bounced two feet in the air in the back of pickups wrestling through washed-out terracotta roads, and rode horseback on the winds of her imagination through the arroyos and mountains of the Arizona high country.
Leaving her studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, she moved to San Francisco, where she learned about peace, love, and exactly what she didn’t want to do with her life. Since then, Jodi graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Business Management, raised four children, worked as an electro-mechanical drafter, penned humor columns for a college periodical, wrote regional western articles, and served as managing editor of a Fortune 500 corporate newsletter. Her lifelong friendship with an eclectic mix of races, down-to-earth cowpunchers, intellectuals, foreigners, country folks, and the Southern Gentry inspires Jodi to write historical and contemporary novels featuring the piquancy of life anywhere in the world.
Reviewed by Alexis Storey for Readers' Favorite
Blackberry Road by Jodi Lea Stewart is set in a small town in Oklahoma in the summer of 1934. This story follows young Biddy Woodson, the second to youngest daughter of a sharecropper’s eleven children. Her summer season gets off to a rocky start after she and her brothers find a dead body that just so happens to be someone important to her. Her summer is thrown into even more turmoil when one of her neighbors, who is a great friend to Biddy, is accused of murder. Biddy spends her summer struggling through grief, frustration, and growing up, learning how much people look down on sharecroppers and black people. Can she endure all this and still be able to prove a man's innocence? Will she find out who committed the murder?
I loved Blackberry Road. Jodi Lea Stewart brought Biddy’s character to life. Biddy has the perfect amount of sass, wit, compassion, and naïvete that I expect in a preteen. Stewart’s portrayal of Biddy’s life as a young girl living in 1934 Oklahoma was very raw and shed some light on how different and similar life was from today. The element of mystery, with the strange sounds coming from the woods and Biddy constantly feeling watched, created the perfect mood of mystery blended with curiosity. I also enjoyed seeing how Biddy interacted with her siblings. It felt like my family, and I loved that I could connect with it.
I highly enjoyed Kas Nixon’s narration. The narrator is the most important part for me when listening to an audiobook as I tend to lose interest fast. Kas Nixon made sure that did not happen once. It was very interactive, and I appreciate that she gave all the characters their unique voices. I was very entertained that she attempted any singing mentioned in the story but did not take herself too seriously. It made it all the more enjoyable. I sometimes get distracted during audiobooks, but Nixon held my interest.
