Your Blues Ain't Like Mine: A Novel [Mass Market Paperback]

Bebe Moore Campbell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 1995

"ABSORBING...COMPELLING...HIGHLY SATISFYING."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"TRULY ENGAGING...Campbell has a storyteller's ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place....There's a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"REMARKABLE...POWERFUL."
--Time
"YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE is rich, lush fiction set in rural Mississippi beginning in the mid-'50s. It is also a haunting reality flowing through Anywhere, U.S.A., in the '90s....There's love, rage and hatred, winning and losing, honor, abuse; in other words, humanity....Campbell now deserves recognition as the best of storytellers. Her writing sings."
--The Indianapolis News
"EXTRAORDINDARY."
--The Seattle Times
"A COMPELLING NARRATIVE...Campbell is a master when it comes to telling a story."
--Entertainment Weekly
YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE won the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work of Fiction

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Written in poetic prose, filled with masterfully drawn and sympathetic characters that a less able hand might have rendered in stereotypes, this first novel blends the irony of Flannery O'Connor's fiction and the poignance of Harper Lee's. Moving quickly and believably from the eve of integration in rural Mississippi to the present-day street gangs in Chicago's housing projects, Campbell ( Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad ) captures the gulf between pre-and post-civil rights America; her story, starting with the murder of a young black man whose trial--argued before an all-white jury--captures national attention, shows us how far we have come and yet suggests we have not come so far after all. When word gets out that black teenager Armstrong Todd was talking French to Lily Cox, the Cox men kill him. Clayton Pinochet, the local newspaper reporter whose father is the most powerful and reactionary man in town, secretly tips off the national press; the men are arrested for what in previous times would have been a permissible crime. Their acquittal makes it clear that the system doesn't provide justice, and life never returns to normal for anyone. Details--the advent of TV, the polio vaccine, a Faulkner novel, Vietnam, women's lib and Oprah! --add to the rich, textured background.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

YA-- The supreme court ruling on desegregation blew winds of change in Hopewell, Mississippi where the classes--monied, poor whites, and blacks--knew their places. When a 15-year-old African-American unknowingly crosses the accepted line, he is brutally murdered by a poor white, setting in motion a series of events that leave no one in the town untouched. Powerful in emotion (from understated to explosive), propelled by unstoppable forces, the book is compelling reading. It exposes family, race, and class divisions in America from the 1950s to the present, and the rich characterization explores the base, the noble, and the ordinary in all of us. This is not for everyone because of the sexual explicitness and the intricate weavings of the social strata. But YAs who were moved by Mildred Taylor's books and Alice Walker's The Color Purple will be ready for and appreciate Campbell.
- Judy Sokoll, Fairfax Country Public Library, VA
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: One World/Ballantine (June 27, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345401123
• ISBN-13: 978-0345401120
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.1 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,254 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #43 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Family Saga

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, May 3, 2005

By 

Justice - See all my reviews

This review is from: Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

This book is clearly based on the tragic story of Emmett Till, the young boy brutally killed for whistling at a white woman in the 1950s. However, it takes on a life and depth of its own, and is remarkable for its sensitive portrayal of how racism destroys both victim and perpetrator.

One of the most compelling aspects of Campbell's narrative is that she does show compassion and a deep understanding for the lives of poor southern whites. She tries to penetrate their consciousness without excusing their acts of violence. This leads to a greater understanding of why such atrocities could take place. The villains are mostly motivated by fear-fear of being seen as weak, for instance. It would be easier to not see them as human, but healing and prevention of future tragedies can only come from greater understanding.

Campbell's insights and skills as a storyteller make this a wonderful read, and her retelling of one of the most horrendous miscarriages of justice in the civil rights period (Emmett Till's murderers never did jail time) make this a book no one should miss.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very good novel that should have been great, June 15, 2002

By 

Stan Vernooy (Henderson, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Your Blues Ain't Like Mine: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback)

"Your Blues Ain't Like Mine" is an ambitious novel. It begins with the murder of an African-American teenager in rural Mississippi in the 1950's. It then follows the boy's family, the family of the murderers, and other citizens of that small Mississippi town, for the next 40 years or so. Many of the Blacks in the story move north to Chicago during this period. So the story describes not only the social and political changes in the deep South during those years, but also the experience of those who exchanged the seething racism of Mississippi for the northern big-city ghettos.

In choosing to portray such a vast - and critically important - period of American history, the author set herself a daunting task. There is a tremendous amount of material to cover in a novel like this. And the job can't be done thoroughly in 460 paperback pages. The author often condenses a major change in a character's lifestyle or philosophy into a single paragraph or even a single sentence.

The characters are well chosen and sympathetic (except the characters who weren't intended to be sympathetic), and the book is well written and well plotted. But for myself, I found myself wanting much more than Ms. Campbell was giving me. I suppose that a 1200-page novel wouldn't have sold nearly as well as this shorter one. But a 1200-page novel, on the same subject and by the same author, might have been a historically great achievement.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting and Intense, September 27, 2002

By 

leg "countedx58" (Livermore, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Your Blues Ain't Like Mine: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback)

There is nothing HAPPY in this book at all. But it's well written, and the story draws you in from the beginning and holds you until the end. I had to stop after every couple of chapters and kind of regroup emotionally because it was so intense.