President Suzanne Keen reviewed Joseph Allen Boone’s debut novel, Furnace Creek, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, hailing it as a “hilarious and heart-rending” recasting of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in the Civil Rights-era South. Keen writes: “Boone flips around the class, race, gender, and sexual identities of Dickens’s text, juggling them into a new pattern with a deeply satisfying riff on the core questions of any bildungsroman: Who will I become? Will my worth be recognized? Will I love and be loved? And how should I respond to the rebuffs, demands, and enticements of the society that surrounds me?”