Moonrise over New Jessup A novel

Civil rights-era fiction generally presupposes that all African Americans fought ardently for integration. Yet in her first novel, winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize, Minnicks brilliantly presents the Black struggle through an anti-integration lens that is equally powerful and persuasive. Alice, on the run from an abusive white neighbor, finds herself in New Jessup, Alabama, an all-Black town with a history of fierce independence. To Alice, New Jessup is miraculous. As she falls in love with Randall, a son of one of the town founders, she grows determined to protect this island of safety and cultural pride. All Randall wants is financial and political independence from the exploitative whites beyond the woods, and neither has any use for race mixing. Yet they are beset by Black integration activists as well as conservative town elders who fear that any "agitation" will spell the community's doom. At a time when many African Americans are questioning the value of integration and the subsequent loss of Black community institutions, Alice and Randall's principled commitment to "separate but equal" segregation is not easily dismissed.

Pen/Bellwether Prize winner Minnicks debuts with the uneven story of a young woman's relationship with her all-Black Alabama community. It's 1957 when Alice Young leaves an abusive landlord for a new start in New Jessup, a unique settlement founded by a coalition of Black families who believed in the ideas of separation espoused by Booker T. Washington. Alice quickly finds a room with a pastor and his wife, and a job sewing at the local dress shop. Soon, she falls in love with the charming Raymond Campbell, who is secretly involved with the National Negro Advancement Society. The community forbids such "agitating," believing it will draw unwanted and dangerous attention from the white side of town and the law, and Alice agrees, not wanting her idyllic new home disturbed. She is soon torn between her love for Raymond and her love for New Jessup. Minnicks brings nuance to Alice's dilemma, but the florid prose tends toward the overwrought: "The moon was generous with its light on our skin, streaming through the window as a creamy night sun." There is much to love in these characters and their resilience, but Minnicks frequently gets in the way. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary. (Jan.)

DEBUT In this 2021 winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, getting off a Birmingham-bound bus in the town of New Jessup entirely changes the life of Alice, our heroine and narrator. The year is 1957, and Alice is amazed that this small town in Alabama has no signage for "coloreds only" at water fountains and restrooms. This community has only Black residents and is a well-organized, well-run, prosperous place. There Alice meets and falls in love with Raymond Campbell, the grandson of one of New Jessup's founders and the owner of a successful automotive repair and towing business. Raymond secretly belongs to the National Negro Advancement Society, an organization striving to keep the races segregated and allow Black Alabamians to flourish without the aid of white people. Alice eventually learns that Raymond's local group aims to make New Jessup a recognized municipality, and like the national group, they do not favor racial integration but separation and self-governance. VERDICT An outstanding writer, Minnicks excels at capturing the atmosphere and issues of a specific locale at a particular time, the Deep South at the dawn of the civil rights era. This highly recommended title is an excellent choice for book discussion groups and would make a great movie.--Lisa Rohrbaugh

A Southern community confronts the meaning of Black power. In a warmly appealing book debut, Minnicks, winner of the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, considers the fraught question of integration from the perspective of an all-Black community in rural Alabama. It's 1957, and Alice Young is on her way to Birmingham after fleeing abuse in the segregated town where she grew up. Getting off the bus to stretch her legs, she is incredulous to find herself in a place with no "WHITES ONLY signs and backdoor Negro entrances." New Jessup, she learns, had been established by freedmen who separated from the White community "across the woods," where they had worked "from field to house and everywhere inside." Even after Whites tried to run the Black people of New Jessup off the land, they rebuilt and set down roots, started thriving businesses, a school, a hospital, and farms. But, Alice soon discovers, there are troubles: A growing national movement for desegregation has incited dissension. Some in New Jessup agree with the NAACP that integration will be favorable for Blacks; others, that "independence, and not mixing" is a better goal. In New Jessup, the independence movement is adopted by the National Negro Advancement Society, whose aim is "keeping folks from across the woods outta our hair and our pockets for good!" Alice would prefer to distance herself from politics, but she becomes immersed in the controversy when she falls in love with an NNAS activist. How, the NNAS asks, can separation work for Negro communities? Will integration mean equal rights--or merely upending lives for something neither Blacks nor Whites want? What is a viable path to real power? Minnicks' impassioned characters struggle with those questions as they think about the consequences of court-mandated integration and the reality of living in a society where, Alice realizes, "not all unwelcoming is posted in the window at eye level." A thoughtful look at a complex issue. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.