This Side of the Sky

By the outbreak of WWII, two young African-American women are ready to leave the segregated South, the constraints of a small black community, and troubled childhoods. As members of the Women's Army Corps, they travel to Europe, where Myraleen meets her life partner and Lilian falls in love with a German prisoner of war. The narrators give excellent performances in this audiobook. They present a plethora of characters who speak an array of black Southern accents; the two main characters are portrayed from elementary school to old age. This novel has truly been enhanced by its transformation to audio. P.R. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

September 30, 2002
This is a sprawling, ambitious saga about two women, lifelong friends, who live through World War II and its aftermath, and the men in their lives. That may sound overly familiar, but the novel offers a very important difference: the two women are black, from rural Mississippi; they spend the war as WACs in London and later in Europe—and the lover of one of them is a thoroughly decent German prisoner of war sent to work in the fields in the Deep South. Lilian, the woman with the German lover, is very black, and also resolute and hard-working; her best friend from school days, Myraleen, is a light-skinned beauty who can, and often does, pass for white, and who is sharp, sardonic and unforgiving. Debut novelist Singleton has an economical, restrained style that is particularly effective in moments of high drama and wartime action, but which is otherwise a little laid back for the emotional punch her story often delivers—and her chapters from the point of view of Kellner, the German POW, lack the conviction of the rest. Still, this is an often warming and poignant story of a seldom-visited side of the war, one that is well worth knowing. (Oct.)Forecast:BlueHen's program of discovery of new novelists has unearthed a writer whose book will certainly speak to black readers and should appeal to a range of white ones, too.