The Summer We Got Saved

This heartfelt novel of the Civil Rights struggle in the small town of Bainbridge, Alabama, in the 1960s turns listeners' expectations upside down and inside out. Narrator Katie Firth expertly navigates this story of teenaged girls politicized into action against racial segregation. One of the most colorful, evocative, and tension-filled scenes takes place at a Nashville lunch counter, where conflict comes simply from sitting at a counter and ordering a hot dog. Firth underplays the accents and helps listeners clearly identify each of the varied personalities. A tragic ending will long be remembered. R.O. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

April 4, 2005
The dawn of integration challenges the Southern smalltown conventions of Bainbridge, Ala., bringing unexpected epiphanies to a cast of loosely connected characters in Devoto's gracefully written new novel. Third-generation farmer Charles Rutland, father of five, watches the family business spiral into debt; as he considers his options, a gubernatorial candidate with a pro-integration message captures his attention and roils local politics. His free-spirited sister, Eugenia, comes to visit and sneaks his two oldest daughters off to Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training camp for civil disobedience and social advocacy. There, Tab and Tina meet Dominique Calder, the biracial Yankee daughter of a divorced Civil Rights movement leader, who exposes the girls to the realities of social injustice. Devoto (My Last Days as Roy Rogers
) also chronicles the parallel story of Tab's friend Maudie May, a polio patient at Tuskegee whose Highlander education galvanizes her to start a voter-registration school. While Maudie works to earn her students' trust, Dominique brings Tab to a lunch counter sit-in in Nashville, an experience that forever changes the formerly complacent teen. Devoto's episodic, nonchronological structure creates potent narrative pull, but her evenhanded, affectionate treatment of her complex characters, each struggling to make sense of their changing world, is the novel's greatest asset. Agent, Molly Friedrich.