Sweet Jiminy

March 28, 2011
Gore's watered-down foray into The Help territory features a Southern-born law student whose attempts to solve a decades-old hate crime stir up predictable outrage. After a bike accident, Jiminy Davis takes a leave of absence from law school to head home to Fayeville, Miss., home of her beloved grandmother, Willa. Distraction presents itself in the form of Bo, the med schoolâbound nephew of Willa's housekeeper, Lyn, until Jiminy stumbles on a long-buried tragedy: her namesake, Lyn's daughter, was killed along with her father in a suspicious accident that was never investigated by the local police. Over her grandmother's objections, Jiminy digs into Fayeville history and, with the help of a scruffy out-of-town lawyer, confronts an ugly truth. Though it contains most of the elements of a legal thriller, Gore's latest (after Sammy's House) lacks the suspense needed to bind the story, while Jiminy's naïveté supplies a weak motivator for dragging out a fairly straightforward mystery.

March 1, 2011

A law-school drop-out returns to her ancestral Mississippi town for solace, but becomes embroiled in the investigation of decades-old race murders.

Jiminy, a summer associate with a high-powered law firm, has an epiphany after she is knocked over by a bike messenger in Chicago's Loop: She does not belong in corporate law. So it's off to Fayeville, Miss., where her mother, long absent from Jiminy's life, grew up. Jiminy moves in with her grandmother, Willa Hunt, who occupies a small farm. Willa's part-time housekeeper, Lyn Waters, has a long history with the Hunt family. In the 1960s, Willa's husband Henry ran a carpentry business, but the actual skilled craftsman was his black partner Edward, Lyn's husband. Their daughter, Jiminy's original namesake, is a bright student who wins a statewide essay contest. Jiminy finds herself drawn to Bo, Lyn's grandnephew, who also takes refuge in Fayeville to study for his medical-school admission test. But the townsfolk look askance at this burgeoning romance between a white woman and an African-American, and Bo breaks it off after the couple is threatened by local thugs. One of the thugs, Roy, is the sycophant of Travis Brayer, former patriarch of Brayer Plantation, now incapacitated by old age and his son's political ambitions. Jiminy gradually learns that the deaths of Lyn's husband and daughter were no accident: Their car was run off the road, and they were shot and thrown into a local river. Apparently the whole town knew who the perpetrators were, but as with many race-motivated killings of the era, the crimes went unprosecuted. Jiminy seeks out Carlos Castaverde, a crusading lawyer who has brought many now-elderly murderers to justice in other lynching cold cases. Sleepy Fayeville is in for a long-overdue rude awakening. Gore, an accomplished screenwriter, seems unaware that the show-don't-tell maxim applies equally to novels. Too often personality description replaces revelation of character through action.

Flawed, but worth reading for its original story line and pithy dialogue.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2011
Abruptly leaving law school in Chicago, Jiminy Davis retreats to her Grandmother Willas rural Mississippi home to figure out what her next step in life should be. Exacerbating her identity crisis is the unsettling news that she was named for another Jiminy, the beloved daughter of Willas housekeeper, Lyn. Even more startling is the discovery that the original Jiminy and her father were heinously murdered during the violent days of the 1960s civil rights movement. Not only were those crimes never solved, they were never even investigated, a fact that stirs Jiminys sense of justice and spurs her to delve into this past mystery. Frustrated by a code of silence that has flourished for 50 years, Jiminy fears shes running out of options until she finds an ally in Lyns nephew, Bo. Their friendship, however, raises eyebrows in a town where racism is still prevalent and old secrets endure. While vividly evoking a menacing sense of small-town protectiveness, Gore deftly handles painful episodes with a gentle touch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)