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Summary
Summary
*NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE*
*An Entertainment Weekly "Must-Read" Book for Fall*
From New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Henderson, an audacious American epic set in rural Georgia during the years of the Depression and Prohibition.
Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: in a house full of secrets, two babies-one light-skinned, the other dark-are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.
Despite the prying eyes and curious whispers of the townspeople, Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. But soon it becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together are more intricate than any could have ever imagined. As startling revelations mount, a web of lies begins to collapse around the family, destabilizing their precarious world and forcing all to reckon with the painful truth.
Acclaimed author Eleanor Henderson has returned with a novel that combines the intimacy of a family drama with the staggering presence of a great Southern saga. Tackling themes of racialized violence, social division, and financial crisis, The Twelve-Mile Straight is a startlingly timely, emotionally resonant, and magnificent tour de force.
Author Notes
Eleanor Henderson is an author who was born in Greece and raised in Florida. She later attended Middlebury College amd the University of Virginia, where she graduated with her MFA. She has written two novels: The Twelve-Mile Straight and Ten Thousand Saints. Her works have appeared in several publications including Ninth Letter, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. She is also the co-editor of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Writers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lingering in the overheated world of the Deep South during the Depression, the convoluted second novel by Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints) delves into questions of race, class, and gender, sometimes at the expense of character development. When Georgia sharecropper and bootlegger Juke's teenaged daughter, Elma, claims to have given birth to twins, one white and one black, her father and her wealthy ne'er-do-well fiancé become enraged, and a black field hand is lynched. Elma cares for the children with the help of Nan, a mute young black servant and midwife in whom Juke takes an interest. The babies are treated as a miracle by some in the community and a sin by others, and they attract the attention of both a polio-stricken researcher who studies sickle cell disease at a university in Atlanta and the members of a chain gang who are paving the little back road on which Elma's family lives. The richly detailed landscape of the volatile mill town where the novel is set immerse the reader in an unsentimental version of the South under economic and social pressure. The plot of the novel is less promising: readers are likely to figure out supposed secrets long before they are revealed. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The births of two babies and the consequent lynching of a black man launch Henderson's (Ten Thousand Saints, 2011) grim investigation into the fractures of race, class, and family in rural Georgia.Pink little Winnafred and brown Wilson are born in the summer of 1930, allegedly the twin offspring of 18-year-old Elma Jesup, whose father, Juke, accuses field hand Genus Jackson of raping her. Elma reluctantly confirms this, and her fiance, Freddie Wilson, helps Juke string up Genus and then skips town. Wealthy George Wilson is furious with Juke for letting his grandson take the blamenot that anyone wants to bring the lynchers to justiceand is suspicious about these "Gemini twins." Indeed, we hear very soon that Wilson was fathered by Juke with Nan, the Jesups' 14-year-old African-American servant. Juke forces the two girls into this absurd deception for reasons that are somewhat obscure until Henderson's tangled saga has unreeled a good deal farther into the year 1931 and back into a past that includes abuse and violence galore. The details are baroque but appropriate to the epically unjust society scathingly depicted. The reign of terror under which African-Americans live takes perhaps its most appalling form in the stories of Nan and her mother, both forced into long-term sexual subjugation by white men, but Elma and the white girls who work at George Wilson's cotton mill are hardly better off. Juke, in Henderson's most multifaceted and terrifying portrait, clings to the prerogatives of race and gender to hide from himself the fact that he's just trash in the eyes of men like George Wilson, who hold the real power in the South. Despite Henderson's evident compassion for her characters, she gives them hardly a moment of grace from the dark opening to the brutal denouement, which makes the tentatively hopeful epilogue somewhat difficult to credit. Strong medicine, not always easy to swallow, but readers who like a challenge will relish this gifted writer's ambition and grit. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Henderson follows her acclaimed debut, Ten Thousand Saints (2011), with this totally immersing, provocative historical novel a multigenerational saga set in 1930s rural Georgia and framed by the Depression, Prohibition, and Jim Crow racism. When Elma, a sharecropper's daughter, gives birth to twins one light like her, and one dark she claims the dark baby is due to her great-great-granddaddy's Indian blood. But her father, Juke, thinks otherwise, as does the probable father, the son of Juke's boss. The violence that follows, fueled by the racism always lurking just under the surface in this isolated town, haunts the family for years. Henderson injects enlightening side plots involving polio, which has left Elma's future husband crippled; sickle-cell anemia, carried by several of Henderson's black characters; and the nascent research into DNA testing, which at least partially solves the deepest of the novel's many secrets. The world of Twelve Mile Straight the rural back road of this engrossing novel's title, with its illegal distillery, chain gangs, and lynchings will continue to haunt readers long after they finish the final page.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE NINTH HOUR, by Alice McDermott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In McDermott's novel, the cause of a young Irish widow and her daughter is taken up by the nuns of a Brooklyn convent. But as the years pass, this struggling pair can't banish worldly temptation, with possibly dire consequences for their faith. MANHATTAN BEACH, by Jennifer Egan. (Scribner, $28.) Egan's first novel since the Pulitzer-winning "A Visit From the Goon Squad" tells a more traditional story - about a woman who works in the Brooklyn Navy Yards during World War II, and the disappearance of her father years earlier - but offers many of the same pleasures of language and character. A FORCE SO SWIFT: Mao, Truman and the Birth of Modern China, 1949, by Kevin Peraino. (Crown, $28.) Peraino's absorbing study of the pivotal year in Chinese-American relations shows how decisions made then have continued to affect relations between the two countries down to the present day. NEW PEOPLE, by Danzy Senna. (Riverhead, $26.) Set in mid-1990s Brooklyn, Senna's novel centers on a light-skinned black woman who despite her engagement to a biracial man becomes infatuated with a dark-skinned poet; it explores both the dream and the impossibility of a "post-racial" world. A LOVING, FAITHFUL ANIMAL, by Josephine Rowe. (Catapult, paper, $16.95.) In Rowe's gorgeous and harrowing debut novel, an emotionally scarred Vietnam veteran disappears from a small Australian town, leaving his family behind to struggle with intergenerational trauma. HALF-LIGHT: Collected Poems, 1965-2016, by Frank Bidart. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40.) With its stylized spacing and typography, Bidart's work scores the speech inside his head. This career retrospective, a contender for a National Book Award this year, shows how he shed the masks of his early poems to create a kind of self-mythology. THE TWELVE-MILE STRAIGHT, by Eleanor Henderson. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) A lynching and the legacy of Jim Crow haunt generations of a family in Henderson's second novel, which is ever alert to the proximity of oppressed and oppressor. Empathy for its troubled cast is one of the novel's great strengths. THE WOLF, THE DUCK & THE MOUSE, by Mac Barnett. Illustrated by Jon Klassen. (Candlewick, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) In this darkly witty collaboration, a mouse is gobbled up by a wolf. Inside, he meets a duck who has set up housekeeping. A PROPERLY UNHAUNTED PLACE, by William Alexander. (Margaret K. McElderry, $16.99; ages 8 to 12.) A woman who specializes in "ghost appeasement" and her daughter move to a town that has banished all ghosts, but all is not as calm as it seems. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
In 1930 Georgia, retribution is swift when white sharecropper's daughter Elma Jesup gives birth to two babies, one dark-skinned. For the presumed rape, field hand Genus Jackson is dragged to his death down a local road called the Twelve-Mile Straight. Thus does the tragedy of racial violence in the Jim Crow South shape the narrative, but -Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints) is after something more, showing the damage wrought by divisions of class as well as race and the way both a family and a community can be sustained by lies. As Elma raises the children with the help of young black housekeeper Nan, nearly a sister to her, it's evident that her dreams for a better life were short-circuited from the start by the contempt with which folks like her are regarded by other whites. The tangled, often painful relations binding Nan, Elma, and Elma's father also emerge, along with questions regarding the children's paternity, a mystery that drives the narrative forward to a strong, morally riven climax. VERDICT -Henderson's highly recommended title delivers a powerful tale of social complexity told in radiant and precise prose. [See Prepub Alert, 3/3/17.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.