Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

As a fourteen-year-old white boy in the American South in 1946, Ansel is uncomfortable with the racial divide and the rigid but unspoken rules that dominate life in his town. He wants to be able to spend unfettered time with his best friend, Willie, who’s black, and he doesn’t want to have to call Willie’s father by his first name or be called “Mr. Ansel” in return. When the town bully, clearly a budding sociopath, kills and violates Mary Susan, the girl of Ansel’s dreams, and blames Willie’s father, Ansel expects his dad to stand up for the truth, but instead, his father allows the townspeople to lynch Willie’s father and even participates in the festival-like atmosphere, leaving Ansel no choice but to leave town forever with a sympathetic older woman who can finance both his and Willie’s future educations. Lester’s spare, lyrical prose is undeniably beautiful, but the very economy of the present-tense narration simplifies complex emotions and requires readers to construct a lot of inferences to fill in gaps. Descriptions lingering over the nascent sexuality of Mary Susan and the waning of those same qualities in Ansel’s mother cast a nostalgic, adult tenor over the emotions of the book; so much talk about the flowering of Southern womanhood may be in keeping with the time period, but it seems a bit overblown for a narrative context so laconic in other areas. Nevertheless, Lester manages to weave a densely constructed damask of injustice into his trim tale, from sins unrepented and unjudged, to wasted love and youth, to friendship denied not for want of love or courage but simply because custom can outweigh both of those things; readers will be moved and inspired to keep on moving to a time when such racially motivated acts are truly and finally unthinkable. An author’s note and chart detailing the practice and prevalence of lynching in America follows the text.