Promise A novel

Review by Booklist Review

Most civil rights-era fiction takes place in the South, seeming to ignore the fact that segregation and racial terrorism existed far beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. In 1958, teen sisters Ezra and Cinthy Kindred and their friend Liddy Junkette are the only Black girls in their Delaware high school. The sisters form a tenuous friendship with the one white student who will associate with them, rebellious, hardscrabble Ruby. Cinthy and Ezra have cultured, educated parents, while Ruby's are at the bottom of the social scale, yet Ruby's whiteness offers her a protection to which Black girls are not entitled. For Ruby, her dreams of social advancement are worth ensnaring Ezra and Cinthy in her schemes, despite the dire consequences the Black girls will face. As the Montgomery bus boycott and the Little Rock Nine crisis unfold, Ezra, Cinthy, Lindy, and their families band together to fight racial hostility, echoing the tragic events that drove the Kindreds north a generation ago. Griffiths (Seeing the Body, 2020) excels at creating a seemingly innocuous small town never more than a hair trigger away from racial violence yet a place of safety and community for white people who "never got to think of what the trees must feel like down home when our bodies be swinging from their branches." Powerful.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The stirring debut novel from poet Griffiths (Seeing the Body) depicts the insidious reach of racism in the Jim Crow era. Cinthy and Ezra Kindred are growing up in 1950s coastal Maine. Their father is a teacher at their school, and the Kindreds' friendship with the Junketts, the only other Black family in their small town, is happy and sustaining. But in the fallout from the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the families' relationships with their white neighbors start to sour. Ezra's longtime best friend Ruby insults the girls' mother by repeating a racist slur said by her own mother, and the sheriff's deputy intimidates the Junketts by repeatedly cruising past their house. These developments dredge up painful stories of the Kindred family's past in Delaware, where Cinthy and Ezra's great-grandfather's church was burned down by white supremacists decades earlier. Griffiths' poetic sensibilities shine in the lyrical language she uses to describe horrific events ("a slicked comet of blood"). The depiction of the families' isolation and vulnerability feels all too real, as does Griffiths' portrayal of how dignity and resilience are passed down through generations. This stands as an affirmation of a family's fierce pride and hard-won joy. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (July)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Jim Crow was at home not only in the South. This is a gorgeous and heart-stopping account of the casual and calculated racism endured by a Black family in 1950s Maine as well as the love and strength that sustain them. Hyacinth "Cinthy" Kindred, the bookish and observant 13-year-old narrator, begins her story with a description of the idyllic last days of summer 1957, before school begins in her seaside hometown of Salt Point. Matter-of-fact references to the isolation in which her family lives take on increased resonance as Cinthy relates the events of several months in the life of her family, which has endured decades of generational harm that still echoes at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Cinthy and her older sister, Ezra, negotiate the early days of their adolescence and their growing awareness of the ways in which their lives will differ from those of their White schoolmates, particularly the impoverished and preternaturally ambitious Ruby. Griffiths' origin stories for several characters serve to reveal the horrors the Kindreds face. Lynchings, burnings, drownings, beatings, legal threats, and vicious schoolroom taunts create the backdrop for the deliberate steps taken by Cinthy's parents--and by their only local Black friends, the Junketts--to instill the pride and strength that will be required for their children to follow "the Path" they are on to self-determination, equality, and respect. Griffiths' considerable talent as a poet creates space for descriptions of otherwise unspeakable horrors. (One character's suicide is described as his having "swallowed the mercy of his own gun.") A stunning and evocative portrait of love, pride, and survival. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 The day before our first day of school always signaled the end of the time Ezra and I loved most. Not time like the clocks that ticked and rang their alarms every morning; we knew that time didn't really begin or end. What we meant by time was happiness, a careless joy that sprawled its warm, sun-stained arms through our days and dreams for eight glorious weeks until our teachers arrived back in our lives, and our parents remembered their rules about shoes, bathing, vocabulary quizzes, and home training. More than anything, we prayed that the air would remain mild for as long as possible, mid-October even, so that we could retain some of our summer independence, free to roam the land we knew and loved. We weren't yet grown, but even the adults could pinpoint when time would tell us we would no longer be young. We mourned summertime's ending and made predictions about autumn and ourselves. Mostly we repeated all the different ways that summer was more honest than the rest of the year. It was the only time we could wear shorts and cropped tops with little comment from our mother. Ezra and I were allowed to walk nearly anywhere we wanted--in the other seasons, we needed permission even to walk to the village docks. And the eating! How we could eat! Mama loosened her apron strings about salt and sugar. Each day, it felt like we were eating from the menu of our dreams--fresh corn, ice cream, sliced tomatoes with coarse salt and pepper, chilled lobster, root beer floats, watermelon, oysters, crab and shrimp salads, fried chicken, homemade lemon or raspberry sorbet, grilled peaches, potato salad, and red popsicles. In the summer, the wildflowers returned, even in the village square. Some dead local official once believed the square, arranged around a small pond with a handful of benches, was a civil idea. Indeed, it would have been charming except there was the sea. Steps away from the square, down the narrow central passage of our village, the main street opened into a slender, shining pier where everything happened. Excerpted from Promise: A Novel by Rachel Eliza Griffiths All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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