This story is amazing as indeed is its lyrical writing. From the Southern American dialect to Mr Willie Willie’s made up words to wonderful descriptions of the country, forest and close-knit community full of secrets, this terrific tale is based on terrible facts. Just post-World War II the black American soldiers returned home to a land that still considered them less than human. This is the story of the ‘murder’ of one such, beaten to death. A year later a New York law firm, the first to investigate civil and human rights, gets a letter asking for help in acquiring justice and it sends a young female lawyer to Mississippi. With many layers, a story within a story, and a particularly powerful plot, this is a beautiful, thought-provoking gem with great depth. A must read.
In 1946 Regina Robichard is a rarity. A young New York civil rights lawyer, working for Thurgood Marshall, Reggie stumbles across a letter asking her boss to investigate the case of a young black soldier whose body has been found floating in the river in Mississippi. It fires her zeal. For Reggie, justice is not the only draw to this case. The letter is signed by the reclusive M. P. Calhoun, author of one of the most banned books in the country, a book Reggie loved as a child, about the friendship between three children, black and white, a magical forest - and a murder. Reggie has just three weeks in the South to investigate. But once down in Mississippi, amid the intoxicating landscape of cotton fields and lush plantations, Reggie not only finds herself further away from New York than she had ever imagined, but walking directly into M. P. Calhoun's book, a place where more than one type of justice exists.
Deborah Johnson is the author of The Air Between Us, which received the Mississippi Library Association Award for Fiction. She lives in Columbus, Mississippi, and is working on her next novel.
