Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel [Paperback]

Joy Jordan-Lake (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2008

"Sacred's not a word I've ever much liked. But maybe some things, and some places, just are.  And maybe the Blue Hole was one of those things."

Shelby (nicknamed Turtle) never had any female friends. But when a mysterious girl from Sri Lanka moved to town in the summer of 1979, Turtle invited her to a secret haven: the Blue Hole. Turtle had no idea how much that simple gesture would affect the rest of her life, or the lives of those she loved.

In a time when America was technically well beyond the Civil Rights era, there were those in Turtle's small Appalachian town who rejected the presence of someone different. And in just one summer-in a collision of love, hate, jealousy, beauty, and a sacred, muddy swimming hole-nothing and everything changed.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joy Jordan-Lake lives in Brentwood, TN with her family.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: David C. Cook; New edition (March 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 143479993X
• ISBN-13: 978-1434799937
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #511,133 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joy Jordan-Lake's varied--and admittedly odd--professional experience has included working as a college professor, author, journalist, waitress, director of a program for homeless families, university chaplain, horseback riding instructor, free lance photographer, and --the job title that remains her personal favorite--head sailing instructor.

Born in Washington, D.C., Joy Jordan-Lake's first vivid childhood memory was watching her mother weep in front of the television, where newscasters were just reporting the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr. Later moving south with her family, she grew up on Signal Mountain, Tennessee, just outside Chattanooga, where she learned to observe the ways in which communities respond with courage to bigotry and violence--or fail to do so.

After earning a bachelors degree from Furman University and a masters from a theological seminary, Joy re-located to the Boston, Massachusetts, area where she earned a masters and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Tufts University, and specialized in the role of race in 19-century American fiction.

While in New England, she founded a food pantry targeting low-income and homeless families, served on the staff of a multi-ethnic church in Cambridge, worked as a free-lance journalist, and became a Baptist chaplain at Harvard. Her first book, Grit and Grace: Portraits of a Woman's Life (Harold Shaw Publishers, 1997), was a collection of stories, poems and essays which The Chicago Tribune described this way: "Written with much heart and wit, this little gem of a book touches on the ordinary and profound experiences that make up a woman's life . . . a poignant and satisfying collection . . . funny and sad, inspiring and awfully surprising."

Joy's second book, Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005) continued her doctoral dissertation work, exploring the inter-weavings of literature, theology, and race in American culture.

During this period, life for Joy and her husband, Todd Lake, was becoming increasingly chaotic with two careers, numerous re-locations for Todd's work, two young biological children and the adoption of a baby girl from China. Joy's nearly-manic need to ask everyone around her about how they managed--or not--to balance kids and career led to her third book, Working Families: Navigating the Demands and Delights of Marriage, Parenting and Career (WaterBrook/ Random House, 2007). Publishers Weekly called the book, "refreshing for its social conscience," and written with "sharp humor and snappy prose."

In its review of Joy's fourth book, Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Alarming Words of Faith (Paraclete Press, 2007), Publishers Weekly again praised the author: "A professor at Belmont University and a former Baptist chaplain at Harvard University , the author mines her personal history...to illumine and interpret ideas such as...hope. Sometimes wry, occasionally stern, Jordan-Lake, with a touch of Southern gothic sensibility...has a gift for welcoming, lucid and insightful prose...."

Joy's first novel, Blue Hole Back Home, published in 2008 and inspired by actual events from her own teenage years, explores the tensions and eventual violence that erupt in a small, all-white Appalachian town when a Sri Lankan family moves in. Ultimately, Blue Hole Back Home, which bestselling author Leif Enger called "beautifully crafted," is a story not only of the devastating effects of racial hatred and cowardice, but more centrally, a celebration of courage, confrontation and healing. Currently being used by colleges, high schools and middle schools around the country, Blue Hole Back Home was recently chosen as Baylor University's Common Book, read and discussed by 4,000 entering first-year students.

Her current project, Steal Away, is the first novel in a trilogy set in 1843-1850, a peak era for the Underground Railroad. Moving between Charleston, South Carolina, and Boston, Massachusetts, the novel grew out of her doctoral research, and draws upon the peculiar, often painful and always intriguing twists and turns, complexities and contradictions of actual history.

Having taught at universities in Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas, Joy Jordan-Lake currently teaches part time at Belmont University in Tennessee. In addition to her time writing and in the classroom, she is a frequent speaker at retreats, workshops and conferences. Residing just south of Nashville, she and her husband share life with their three fabulous children, as well as the family's sweet, needy Golden Retriever and two cats.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A delightfully haunting book, July 14, 2008

By 

FaithfulReader.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (Paperback)

An unopened book is a tease that can lead to disappointment. But here is one that delivers. It's well-written and as deep as a blue-water swimming hole that kids used to flock to, before everyone put up no trespassing signs, afraid of liability.

It's a book that transports you to a time and place: 1979 on Pisgah Ridge in North Carolina, a community where "there were no blacks... Sure there were the ones who cleaned our houses and mowed our lawns, but they all left on the last bus" to return to the town in the valley. "And they knew enough to never miss that ride down."

The narrator, Shelby, is a high school sophomore and the only girl in a "mangy pack" consisting of her brother Emory, his best friend Jimbo Riggs --- son of the pastor of the largest Baptist church on the Ridge --- "and a spare friend of theirs and an excess cousin." Virtually every summer evening, these kids, riding in the back of Emory's pick-up, end up at a swimming hole --- not causing trouble, just hanging out.

But there's a new family on the Ridge, from Sri Lanka. They're not only dark-skinned but Muslim. Rather impulsively, Turtle invites the teen daughter, Sanna, to ride along to Blue Hole. Over the summer, she's tentatively, then dramatically, welcomed into the group. But not everybody is ready for an integrated Ridge, say nothing of an integrated creek.

Right up front, before the flashback, the reader knows something will go awry: "It was the men in white bed sheets that changed us forever --- them and the Blue Hole, that is."

The narrator doesn't claim a Christian faith, neither as a teen nor as an adult transplanted to Boston. Yet she notices its evidence in others: her Methodist mother and particularly Jimbo, the Baptist preacher's son, who holds the "mangy pack" and the book together.

Author Joy Jordan-Lake's writing --- her characterizations and figures of speech --- is downright refreshing. Though in chapter after chapter the teens' parents are largely absent from the scene, they are not totally "out of the loop." In one scene the phone rings when the Garden Club ladies are meeting at Shelby's house. It's Sanna, inviting Shelby for a sleepover. Shelby's mother gives permission and then says, "Shelby, sugar." Shelby notes, "It was the kind of sugar that works like a yank to a leash...

"`Who was it? Which of your girlfriends asked you to sleep over?'

"Bless Mama. She said this as if there were legions of girls waiting to ask me to their houses... `The, um, the new girl.'

"Now, all white Southern women keep as a weapon...a certain smile that can be whipped out of storage and tacked up in an instant, covering over a multitude of too-candid moments."

Shelby explains: Mama "was considering, I knew, that the Garden Club ladies were gripping sweet tea beside her, but also what Jesus would do. `Well, now,' she murmured. `"Turn ye not away strangers, lest ye entertain angels unawares.' Isn't that right?' Mama looked to the wife of the good Reverend Riggs" --- a descendant of several Confederate heroes --- and Jimbo's mother.

I finished reading BLUE HOLE BACK HOME 24 hours ago, and the characters and setting linger in my mind. This is a delightfully haunting book. I don't want to give too much away, but I urge you to take my advice and read it.

--- Reviewed by Evelyn Bence

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unforgettable, March 27, 2008

By 

KMJ "Sassy Southern Sister" (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (Paperback)

Joy Jordan-Lake has crafted a beautiful, tragic southern tale that will have you exclaiming, "Great day in the mornin'!" with tears running down your cheeks. Well, before you do that you'll long for a wide front porch with a screen to keep out the bugs and a slippery glass of sweet iced tea. You'll laugh with and love Shelby Lenoir, big brother Emerson and best friend James Beauregard (could the names be any more beautifully southern?). The characters are lively and imaginative. I fell in love with them all - Mollybird Pitman included. Well, I'm not sure that I loved Mort Beckwith but he was imperative to the story so I tolerated him and his band of idiots. I am not a writer (and if you've read this far you've surmised as much) but I do know good writing when I see it. You simply must read this book. It is, sadly, relevant for our world even now. So there... There's my very first amazon review. Now stop reading my feeble words and buy or borrow a copy. You will not regret it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful story, March 6, 2009

By 

Sharon K. Souza (Acampo, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (Paperback)

I'd give Blue Hole Back Home 6 stars if I could. It was the best book I read all last year. I'm reading it a second time now, as it's the first selection of a newly-formed book club I'm a member of.

Not only is this a hauntingly beautiful story, but Joy Jordan Lake's prose is nothing short of delicious. The images her words conjur are rich and wonderful. As an author, she ranks with the very best.