Promise

May 29, 2023
The stirring debut novel from poet Griffiths (Seeing the Body) depicts the insidious reach of racism in the Jim Crow era. Cinthy and Ezra Kindred are growing up in 1950s coastal Maine. Their father is a teacher at their school, and the Kindreds’ friendship with the Junketts, the only other Black family in their small town, is happy and sustaining. But in the fallout from the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the families’ relationships with their white neighbors start to sour. Ezra’s longtime best friend Ruby insults the girls’ mother by repeating a racist slur said by her own mother, and the sheriff’s deputy intimidates the Junketts by repeatedly cruising past their house. These developments dredge up painful stories of the Kindred family’s past in Delaware, where Cinthy and Ezra’s great-grandfather’s church was burned down by white supremacists decades earlier. Griffiths’ poetic sensibilities shine in the lyrical language she uses to describe horrific events (“a slicked comet of blood”). The depiction of the families’ isolation and vulnerability feels all too real, as does Griffiths’ portrayal of how dignity and resilience are passed down through generations. This stands as an affirmation of a family’s fierce pride and hard-won joy. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from May 15, 2023
Jim Crow was at home not only in the South. This is a gorgeous and heart-stopping account of the casual and calculated racism endured by a Black family in 1950s Maine as well as the love and strength that sustain them. Hyacinth "Cinthy" Kindred, the bookish and observant 13-year-old narrator, begins her story with a description of the idyllic last days of summer 1957, before school begins in her seaside hometown of Salt Point. Matter-of-fact references to the isolation in which her family lives take on increased resonance as Cinthy relates the events of several months in the life of her family, which has endured decades of generational harm that still echoes at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Cinthy and her older sister, Ezra, negotiate the early days of their adolescence and their growing awareness of the ways in which their lives will differ from those of their White schoolmates, particularly the impoverished and preternaturally ambitious Ruby. Griffiths' origin stories for several characters serve to reveal the horrors the Kindreds face. Lynchings, burnings, drownings, beatings, legal threats, and vicious schoolroom taunts create the backdrop for the deliberate steps taken by Cinthy's parents--and by their only local Black friends, the Junketts--to instill the pride and strength that will be required for their children to follow "the Path" they are on to self-determination, equality, and respect. Griffiths' considerable talent as a poet creates space for descriptions of otherwise unspeakable horrors. (One character's suicide is described as his having "swallowed the mercy of his own gun.") A stunning and evocative portrait of love, pride, and survival.

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Starred review from May 15, 2023
Most civil rights-era fiction takes place in the South, seeming to ignore the fact that segregation and racial terrorism existed far beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. In 1958, teen sisters Ezra and Cinthy Kindred and their friend Liddy Junkette are the only Black girls in their Delaware high school. The sisters form a tenuous friendship with the one white student who will associate with them, rebellious, hardscrabble Ruby. Cinthy and Ezra have cultured, educated parents, while Ruby's are at the bottom of the social scale, yet Ruby's whiteness offers her a protection to which Black girls are not entitled. For Ruby, her dreams of social advancement are worth ensnaring Ezra and Cinthy in her schemes, despite the dire consequences the Black girls will face. As the Montgomery bus boycott and the Little Rock Nine crisis unfold, Ezra, Cinthy, Lindy, and their families band together to fight racial hostility, echoing the tragic events that drove the Kindreds north a generation ago. Griffiths (Seeing the Body, 2020) excels at creating a seemingly innocuous small town never more than a hair trigger away from racial violence yet a place of safety and community for white people who ""never got to think of what the trees must feel like down home when our bodies be swinging from their branches." Powerful.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.