Synopsis
Embracing the conservative and discriminatory belief systems of her Southern hometown, Tab witnesses profound changes in the attitudes of her friends and family throughout the course of a 1960s gubernatorial campaign, which is marked by the establishment of a voting school for church members. By the author of Out of the Night That Covers Me.
Reviews
Adult/High School–Told from three points of view, this thought-provoking story takes place in Alabama and Tennessee during the early 1960s. Tab is a junior high school girl whose primary concerns are nail color and being tolerated by the high school crowd at the local soda shop. Her childhood friend, Maudie, is a black polio victim who wears a leg brace and recently survived a fire at the Tuskegee Polio Institute. Tab's father, Charles, is a hardworking farmer descended from one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. All three lives are dramatically changed by the events of one summer. When Tab and her older sister embark on a secret trip to the Highlander Folk School with their socially conscious aunt, they become unwilling participants in an interracial camp, living with Civil Rights activists. At the same time, Maudie is recruited to help prepare resistant African Americans for voter registration by teaching life skills and reading, and Charles is trying to keep his farm solvent and his family in their accustomed genteel lifestyle while supporting the candidate running against segregationist George Wallace. The stories converge when the main characters experience the tragic consequences of their involvement with integration. The complicated plot might discourage less-serious readers, but this well-written and historically important novel is likely to find a place on this year's best books lists.–Pat Bender, The Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, PA
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The dawn of integration challenges the Southern smalltown conventions of Bainbridge, Ala., bringing unexpected epiphanies to a cast of loosely connected characters in Devoto's gracefully written new novel. Third-generation farmer Charles Rutland, father of five, watches the family business spiral into debt; as he considers his options, a gubernatorial candidate with a pro-integration message captures his attention and roils local politics. His free-spirited sister, Eugenia, comes to visit and sneaks his two oldest daughters off to Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training camp for civil disobedience and social advocacy. There, Tab and Tina meet Dominique Calder, the biracial Yankee daughter of a divorced Civil Rights movement leader, who exposes the girls to the realities of social injustice. Devoto (My Last Days as Roy Rogers) also chronicles the parallel story of Tab's friend Maudie May, a polio patient at Tuskegee whose Highlander education galvanizes her to start a voter-registration school. While Maudie works to earn her students' trust, Dominique brings Tab to a lunch counter sit-in in Nashville, an experience that forever changes the formerly complacent teen. Devoto's episodic, nonchronological structure creates potent narrative pull, but her evenhanded, affectionate treatment of her complex characters, each struggling to make sense of their changing world, is the novel's greatest asset. Agent, Molly Friedrich. (June)
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*Starred Review* Alabama in the 1960s was still in denial about the civil rights movement. Tab Rutland proudly proclaimed that Cousin John Lester was one of the founding members of the Klu Klux Klan. Her sister, Tina, was too interested in makeup and boys to bother with history or politics. And their father would back the same tired candidate for governor because that's what his kinfolk always did--until Aunt Eugenia visits from California and talks the girls into going to visit a wealthy cousin in Chattanooga. On the way, she admits that her real plan is to educate the girls by taking them to the Highlander Folk School once attended by Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. There Tab is introduced to nonviolent protests and the lies told by both white and black. And back home, their father breaks with tradition and backs a new candidate for governor who just might beat Wallace. This is a wonderfully poignant, funny, and intelligent book about coming-of-age and wisdom. The narrative never becomes preachy, and all the characters are realistically flawed and completely delightful. Elizabeth Dickie
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