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Summary
Summary
The author of "To Dance with the White Dog" returns with a powerful novel of family and justice, set in the rural Deep South in the fateful days after World War II. Regional signings and tours.
Author Notes
Terry Kay was born February 10, 1938 in Royston, Georgia. He grew up there and became a well-known novelist. Perhaps his most well-known book is To Dance with the White Dog, which was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in 1983. He is also the author of such best-selling works as Dark Thirty, Shadow Song, After Eli, and The Runaway, which was adapted for the screen. He won an Emmy for his screenplay Run Down the Rabbit. Kay's novel The Valley of Light won the 2004 Townsend Prize for Fiction and was also adapted for the screen. He won the 1981 Georgia Author of the Year Award for After Eli, and the Southeastern Library Association named him Outstanding Author of the Year in 1991 for To Dance with the White Dog. He published The Book of Marie in 2007. His last book, The Forever Wish of Middy Sweet, was published in August 2020. Terry Kay died on December 12, 2020 at the age of 82.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Even the most devoted among Kay's faithful fans, those who are awaiting a successor to To Dance with the White Dog, will have difficulty plodding through the forced prose in this overwritten tale of racial violence in rural north Georgia during the late 1940s. Readers who stick out the purple early chapters (dogs, the night breeze and gray light all manage to "slither") will be somewhat relieved to discover an engaging, if derivative, story lurking here. Kay enlists ghosts of Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and God's Little Acrealong with a white-turbaned voodoo priestess called Conjure Womanin a brave, doomed attempt at country pathos. When two inseparable 12-year-old boysone white, one blackstumble onto a human leg bone sticking out of a sawdust pile, WWII hero Sheriff Frank Rucker is obliged to probe the unsolved murders of three black menmurders long attributed to a near-mythical masked phantom known in local lore only as Pegleg. Meanwhile, as racial hatred, economic and sexual exploitation and rising social consciousness erupt into rape and more murder, they threaten the sheriff's shy romance with the seductive widow of one of the suspects. Even once the plot gets underway, the writing is inflated and grandiose, and after a climactic, Grisham-esque courtroom scene helps fulfill the Conjure Woman's prophecy, Kay has left few clichés of the popular Southern novel unabused. Author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Years-old murders spark racial tensions in the rural South in this latest from Kay (Shadow Song, 1994, etc.). In the small town of Crossover, events have generally abided by Logan's Law--the invention of Logan, a former sheriff who spoke of the ``law of the way things are.'' But it's now the late '40s, when the minds of many townspeople have been broadened by their war experiences, and the new sheriff, Frank, is more interested in justice than tradition. Events are set into motion when two 12-year-olds--Son Jesus, mature, mathematically gifted, and black; and Tom, imaginative, prankish, and white--try to run away from home. As they make their way downriver, self-consciously reenacting Huck's and Jim's roles, they stumble upon human bones buried in an old sawmill. The boys are eventually tracked down and returned to their families, but the bones turn out to belong to Son Jesus' father, who's been missing for a few years--one victim of three racially motivated murders committed, according to longstanding rumor, by a masked man known as Pegleg. As Frank investigates, he finds himself becoming enamored of the pretty young widow, Evelyn Carnes, on whose property the father was found and whose deceased husband may have had a role in the deaths. Meanwhile, Frank's dogged inquiries polarize racial sentiments in Crossover, testing the friendship of Tom and Son Jesus as they approach the end of childhood. The situation reaches a crisis when a local bully, Harlan, is accused of raping Son Jesus' sister Remona, and, shortly after, is found dead, an uncle of Son Jesus a prime suspect. Gracefully written, though the disjointed story, borrowing from such tales of childhood and race as To Kill a Mockingbird to Huckleberry Finn, never really gathers the momentum it should. (Author tour)
Booklist Review
Naively defying the mores of their small Georgia hometown, 12-year-olds Tom Winter, white, and Son Jesus Martin, black, have been friends their whole lives. But their twelfth summer brings change. Their accidental discovery of a human bone buried in a sawdust pile at an abandoned mill they pass while running away from home and the vicious rape of Son Jesus' sister by the family's white landlord set in motion events that forever change the boys' relationship and the way they see the world. When sheriff Frank Rucker investigates the incidents, he finds himself up against a legacy of fierce racism and injustice that he's determined to expose and change. The author of To Dance with the White Dog (1990) offers a curiously sprawling but still entertaining mix of mystery, quiet comedy, and penetrating insight, set against a post^-World War II backdrop peopled with characters who represent both the best and worst of humankind. With its deliberate echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn, this won't be a hard sell. Try it with readers who liked John Grisham's A Time to Kill (1992). --Stephanie Zvirin
Library Journal Review
Kay, whose bittersweet family drama To Dance with the White Dog (Pocket, 1993) wowed readers and viewers alike (it was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation), here tells of two young Southern boys maturing in the midst of racial upheaval. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
