If You Come Softly

Starred review from September 28, 1998
Once again, Woodson (I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This) handles delicate, even explosive subject matter with exceptional clarity, surety and depth. In this contemporary story about an interracial romance, she seems to slip effortlessly into the skins of both her main characters, Ellie, an upper-middle-class white girl who has just transferred to Percy, an elite New York City prep school, and Jeremiah, one of her few African American classmates, whose parents (a movie producer and a famous writer) have just separated. A prologue intimates heartbreak to come; thereafter, sequences alternate between Ellie's first-person narration and a third-person telling that focuses on Jeremiah. Both voices convincingly describe the couple's love-at-first-sight meeting and the gradual building of their trust. The intensity of their emotions will make hearts flutter, then ache as evidence mounts that Ellie's and Jeremiah's "perfect" love exists in a deeply flawed society. Even as Woodson's lyrical prose draws the audience into the tenderness of young love, her perceptive comments about race and racism will strike a chord with black readers and open the eyes of white readers ("Thing about white people," Jeremiah's father tells him, "they know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white"). Knowing from the beginning that tragedy lies just around the corner doesn't soften the sharp impact of this wrenching book. Ages 10-up.

December 1, 1998
Gr 7 Up-Two 15 year olds, Jeremiah (Miah) who is black, and Elisha (Ellie) who is white, meet during their first year at an exclusive New York prep school and fall in love. Both teens are also dealing with difficult family situations. Miah's father has left his mother for another woman, and Ellie is trying to fight through her feelings about her mother, who twice abandoned her family for extended periods. The teenagers must also deal with the subtle and not-so-subtle bigotry that they are subject to as a mixed-race couple. Miah and Ellie go about working through their problems, both individually and together, and their relationship continues to blossom, giving readers a shared sense of contentment. Thus, the tragic climax will leave them stunned. Woodson's lyrical narrative tells the story through alternating voices, Ellie's in the first person and Miah's in the third. This fine author once again shows her gift for penning a novel that will ring true with young adults as it makes subtle comments on social situations.-Tom S. Hurlburt, La Crosse Public Library, WI

October 1, 1998
Gr. 7^-10. People stare when teenagers Miah and Ellie touch and hold hands in public. He is black. She is white. In alternating chapters, we learn about how they meet in their private high school and fall in love, and we learn a lot about their families, both of which are far from perfect." "As in all her fiction, Woodson confronts prejudice head-on. Miah's family is rich and famous, but when he and Ellie walk in Central Park, two old white women ask her if she is all right. Ellie, whose family is Jewish and secular, comes to realize that she takes her whiteness, her race, for granted in a way that Miah never can. He always knows he is black. The burning of black churches in the South are part of who he is. His mother accepts Ellie; so does his friend whose family is biracial. But Ellie's lesbian older sister asks Ellie to think twice about dating a black guy. What will her parents do? Readers will wish that Woodson had given us that elemental scene when Ellie brings Miah home to dinner. Instead, the sudden violent ending is a devastating shock that seems stuck on, though it does make us go back and reread the story for clues, and they are there. Many will want to go on from this story to the personal essays in "Half & Half": "Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural." ((Reviewed October 1, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)