From Publishers Weekly
Alabama native Howard revisits a 1981 Mobile, Ala., lynching in his debut novel, an extended version of a short story he wrote that won the 2001 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Narrator Roy Deacon, a 17-year-old seventh-generation mortician, is pressed into service after his brother, Paul, discovers a friend's body hanging from a camphor tree. Roy prepares the body for burial while the community's most fiery leaders rally to press the police to find a better explanation for murder than "a drug deal gone wrong." Throughout the commotion, Roy maintains a remarkable calm as he approaches the end of his senior year in high school, prepares bodies and attends to a distressed Paul. Howard combines these elements to create a slow pace and a mournful mood, though heavy description and overemphasis on metaphor remind the reader that this is Howard's first novel. Justice is meted out in an epilogue, and Howard uses the facts of the case to hit home the novel's premise: that even with justice, there are some stains that will never be erased by time.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From Booklist
The town of Mobile, Alabama, in the summer of 1981, when headlines were dominated by the Atlanta child killings, awakens to find a black youth hanging from a neighborhood tree. Sixteen-year-old Roy Deacon, son of the local black funeral director, offers the first-person narrative of his brother Paul's discovery of the body of a friend and classmate, and the town's struggle to reconcile the lynching with any notions that its black residents have of racial progress. Paul has managed to escape the expectations that he will go into the family business, seven generations long. The burden falls all the heavier on Roy, whose distaste doesn't outweigh his strong sense of duty. Looking back 22 years after the event, Roy wrestles with the memory of the lynching at a turning point in the life of the town and his family. Based on the true story of one of the last recorded lynchings in the U.S., Howard's debut novel offers a subtle and stirring look at the complexities of racial hatred and family obligations.
Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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