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Description edit
In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm—a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Characters/People edit
- Henry McAllan: Farm renter and husband to Laura; almost 50; WWI veteran;
- Laura McAllan: Wife to Henry McAllan and mother of two small daughters/farmwife; hardworking;
- Jamie McAllan: Brother of Henry. A war veteran (WWII) who returns home to the farm very unsettled; 29 years old
- Amanda Leigh: daughter of Henry and Laura; quiet; serious
- Isabelle: daughter to Henry and Laura; demanding
- Pappy: Father of Jamie and Henry. Was a most unlikeable man; was bossy, lazy, a heavy smoker; scared the children; had yellow teeth and fingers; deceased
- Ronsel Jackson: negro; WWII veteran, son of sharecroppers
- Fanny: Laura's sister
- Etta: Laura's sister
- Teddy: Laura's brother (WWII)
- Eliza: Teddy's wife
- Pearce: Laura's brother (WWII)
- Eboline: sister of Henry, former Cotton Queen of Greenville; widowed
- Thalia: sister of Henry, former Cotton Queen of Greenville
- Hap Jackson: light-skinned Negro; Ronsel's father. Part time preacher and tenant farmer on Henry and Laura McAllan's property
- Florence Jackson: Wife to Hap and mother of Ronsel. Cleans the McAllan's house
- Carl Atwood: tenant farmer on Henry and Laura McAllan's property
- Vera Atwood: Carl's wife
- Alma Atwood: Carl and Vera's youngest girl
Quotes edit
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“We didn't stay in their country long, but I'll always be grateful to those English folks for how they welcomed us. First time in my life I ever felt like a man first and a black man second.”
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“God never gives us a task without giving us the means to see it through. That mama worry come straight from Him, it make it so she can't help but look after that child.”
- Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
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That’s what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must.
Highlighted by 207 Kindle customers -
The truth isn’t so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose.
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Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that.
Highlighted by 191 Kindle customers -
How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.
Highlighted by 158 Kindle customers -
Sometimes it’s necessary to do wrong. Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right. Any God who doesn’t understand that can go fuck Himself.
Highlighted by 124 Kindle customers -
It would be six years into my marriage before I remembered that cleave has a second meaning, which is “to divide with a blow, as with an axe.”
Highlighted by 111 Kindle customers -
He’d given me all the clues I needed to see the weakness at the core of him, and the darkness. I’d ignored them, preferring to believe the fiction. Jamie had created that fiction, acting the part almost to perfection, but I’d been the one who swallowed it whole. I was to blame, for having fallen in love with a figment.
Highlighted by 104 Kindle customers -
We didn’t stay in their country long, but I’ll always be grateful to those English folks for how they welcomed us. First time in my life I ever felt like a man first and a black man second.
Highlighted by 90 Kindle customers -
So it was that our father was laid to rest in a slave’s grave, in a hurried, graceless ceremony presided over by an accusatory colored preacher, while the woman who meant to kill him looked on, stiff-backed and full of impotent rage that somebody else had beaten her to it.
Highlighted by 87 Kindle customers -
Just like that, my life was overturned. Henry didn’t ask me how I felt about leaving my home of thirty-seven years and moving with his cantankerous father in tow to a hick town in the middle of Mississippi, and I didn’t tell him. This was his territory, as the children and the kitchen and the church were mine, and we were careful not to trespass in each other’s territories. When it was absolutely necessary we did it discreetly, on the furthermost borders.
Highlighted by 81 Kindle customers
Setting & Locations edit
First Sentence edit
Henry and I dug the hole seven feet deep.
Series & Lists edit
This book is in 2010-2011 Iowa High School Battle of the Books. (authoritative list)
This book is in KCPL Discussion Kit (Aug2010). (community list)
Authors & Contributors edit
- Hillary Jordan (Author)
First Edition edit
Original Language: English
Publisher: Algonquin
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: 2008
ISBN: 156512569X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: 2008
ISBN: 156512569X
Page Count: 336
Awards edit
- Alex Awards (2009)
- Bellwether Prize for Fiction (2006)
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 813.6
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