Solid Southern Royalty Family Drama. We don’t have actual royalty in the United States, but in different areas of the country we do have very rich families – sometimes rich going back many generations, sometimes (particularly over the last century) much newer (ala The Great Gatsby). This is a modern tale of one such family, and Gilbert really does a great job of bringing us – even those of us who themselves rose from “trailer park trash” to having “respectable” jobs and titles like I have – into this world in a stunningly vivid manner that will truly transport you to the hills of western Appalachian horse country from no matter where you may actually live in the world.
Having grown up just miles away from a prominent horse racing facility and event – the Atlanta Steeplechase at Kingston Downs in Kingston, GA – and rubbing elbows with some of the elite of my home County on the borderlands of southern Appalachia and Atlanta due to… well, I never actually knew why and the one thing I was aware of seems a bit too self aggrandizing to proclaim in this review… I actually have enough experience at the fringes of the type of family Gilbert creates in this book to truly say that at least from my perspective, this entire tale was simply all too real.
Yes, including the… let’s say “family dynamics”… at play here. Some of which are a lot more universal than just the Southern Elite “royalty” type families, and at least some of which I’ve seen play out across family, friends, and associates no matter their “status” in “society”. Here, Gilbert really manages to bring these elements out as just as real and powerful as the setting she puts the family in, and the two sides of the tale combine rather spectacularly.
One thing that I appreciated that others may not find as appealing is how Gilbert managed to craft a mildly Christian tale here but keep it more muted and more “this exists in this world” level rather than any remotely preachy aspect to it – even the actual prayers in the text are simple meal-based “grace” prayers that are legitimately common throughout the region and not really sectarian at all. More formalized than the joke “Good food, Good meat, Good God let’s eat!” prayer you’ll hear at some Southern meals, but really at about the same theological depth, at least in the content of the prayers shown in this text. To flip it around a touch, it is really more akin to having an LGBT couple in the tale that everyone simply accepts as they are without making any real fuss about it and without it truly playing a role in the tale. Again, truly just a “this exists and now we’re moving on” level. Which will still be too much for some readers, for the same reasons the LGBT couple’s presence would be too much for other readers, and hey, you do you. You’ll find no judgement from me on that point, but I do appreciate when authors are able to integrate these types of things into their stories – either direction – in this exact manner, and Gilbert truly does an excellent job of this from the Christian side here.
This is Book 1 to a new series, and it does in fact show – we get a fully fleshed out world, one complete tale here (with enough room to follow it going forward without it continuing to be the main focus), and a lot of side stories such that clearly some of them will get their own stories, while seemingly others may be a bit of a running plotline of sorts perhaps through the entire series. It will be interesting to see how Gilbert plays these lines in particular, and one great thing to note is that even as I write this review the day before this book actually releases to the public, Book 2 is actually coming in just a couple of weeks! I for one am very excited about that for several reasons, chief among them being I won’t have read over 100 books between books in a series for a change! 😀 But seriously, this is absolutely a tremendous setup for a series that we’re going to want to come back into this world at least a few times, and I’m truly glad the first of those is very soon.
Very much recommended.
This review of Silverleaf by Kellie Coates Gilbert was originally written on April 15, 2026.