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Synopsis
(The events recorded in this novel occur during the 1930s in a small Mississippi town, but the range of characters, emotions and social forces, and the inexorable march to doom of a ten-year-old black boy and the society that dooms him, catapult the story beyond a specific time and location)
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About the Author
Albert French served four years in the US Marines and later worked as a medical photographer and photojournalist. He is the founder of the Pittsburgh Preview Magazine, as well as the author of the novels Billy and Holly, and the memoir Patches of Fire. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
From Kirkus Reviews
Death, race, and injustice in the Deep South--in a deeply felt but crude first novel about the accidental death of a white girl that leads to the judicial murder of the black boy who killed her. The small town of Banes, Mississippi, 1937. White folks live in town, black folks live in the Patch. Proudest of the latter is Cinder, who has raised her son Billy Lee Turner on her own; her man Otis left for Chicago before Billy was born. But ten-year-old Billy has inherited Otis's ``wild-dog temper'' and carries a knife. Swimming in a pond in the woods with his friend Gumpy, the boys are attacked and overpowered by two older white girls, Lori and Jenny. Struggling to escape, Billy stabs Lori, who dies soon after. White vigilantes storm through the Patch and burn down a shack, despite the boys' speedy arrest. Even though mean Sheriff Tom concedes that ``that boy ain't got the slightest idea what he done,'' Billy is charged with first-degree murder, tried as an adult, sentenced to death and electrocuted. All of this is told with melodramatic frenzy (Cinder's eyes ``glowed the color of her burning soul'') and in a dialect so thick the characters sink under its weight. The all-seeing narrative eye roves so restlessly over a host of black and white characters that it never fixes on one, even Billy, for long--while minor but important characters, like Cinder's white father, get lost in the shuffle. Aside from a few moments of pathos when Billy is on Death Row, French's novel stays at the level of a lurid comic-strip. It is always distressing when a writer works at a harrowing portrayal of evil and misses by a country mile. For a fine treatment of similar material, read Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying (p. 167). -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherVintage
- Publication date1994
- ISBN 10 0749397713
- ISBN 13 9780749397715
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages224
- Rating
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