Safe from the Neighbors

September 28, 2009
Yarbrough's tightly constructed latest is hobbled by the ordinariness of its characters and the situations they find themselves in. The story is told from the point of view of Luke May, a high school teacher and history buff living in a small Mississippi River delta town where he and his wife carry on a passionless marriage. During Luke's childhood, a family friend killed his wife, and Luke never fully understood the circumstances. After Maggie, one of the slain mother's children, returns to town as the new high school French teacher, Luke begins to unravel the murder, which coincided with one of the key moments in the civil rights movement. He also begins an affair with Maggie, providing a bit of tension as the reader wonders where the affair will lead and what Luke will learn about the shooting. The book's pacing and language are superb, and while Yarbrough (The End of California
) is terrific at getting inside the head of his protagonist, what's inside isn't very special.

October 15, 2009
A Mississippi high-school teacher can't separate his hometown's uneasy past from his own in this thoughtful novel from Yarbrough (The End of California, 2006, etc).

Loring native Luke May takes a just-the-facts approach to history, teaching his students the difficulty of pinpointing cause and effect. As the school year starts, Luke is at loose ends. His daughters have gone to college, his aging parents are in failing health, he and his wife Jennifer, an aspiring poet who teaches freshman English at a nearby college, have drifted into minimal verbal and sexual communication. Then he meets the flashy new French teacher, Maggie Sorrentino, ne Calloway. Maggie left Loring as a little girl in 1962, after her father Arlan shot and killed her mother Nadine in what was ruled self defense. Luke's father considered Arlan his best friend, although the more affluent Arlan was threatening his livelihood. The night of the killing, which was also the eve of James Meredith's historic enrollment at Ole Miss, the two men had driven to Oxford as members of the local White Citizens Council. As Luke falls into an affair with Maggie, he begins digging to uncover the truth of what happened that night 44 years ago. From a snippet of conversation Maggie remembers overhearing as a child, Ned suspects that his father, a less-than-successful farmer and admitted racist but also a war hero and devoted husband to his now-senile wife, might have had some kind of relationship with Maggie's mother not unlike Luke's relationship with Maggie. More sleuthing brings up a romantic connection between Nadine and Luke's otherwise saintly mentor, local newspaper editor Ellis Buchanan, who courageously stood up for integration when no one else did. Learning the truth has its price, and Luke pays dearly.

Loring is Yarbrough's Yoknapatawpha County, and he uses what in other hands could be a banal plot to bring to vital life the complicated interplay of cause and coincidence in history and individual lives.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 15, 2009
Luke May is a high school history teacher in Loring, MS, with a deteriorating marriage. When his childhood friend Maggie returns to town, Luke is drawn into an affair with her. At the same time, he attempts to reconstruct the history of an event from Maggie's past that happened to coincide with the battle over the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. Though the large cast of characters and constant jumping back and forth in time require close attention, Yarbrough ("The End of California") successfully ties together the various threads of the story. VERDICT In a straightforward and nonjudgmental way, Yarbrough looks at the aftermath of the South's racist history and its impact on the generations after the Civil Rights Movement. Here, there are no heroes or villains, only flawed humans who responded differently to changing times. Broad appeal.Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2010
Our lives are inextricable from history. In his new novel, Yarbrough intertwines James Merediths enrollment at Ole Miss with a towns not-so-admirable response. Decades later, local historian and high-school teacher Luke May struggles with his fathers involvement in Merediths enrollment. May also initiates his familys crumbling. Being a historian, or perhaps simply by being human, May is incapable of forgetting, which he recognizes as both blessing and curse. Yarbrough wonderfully displays the social upheaval of a specific era and the often-overlooked complexities of small-town life. He also intelligently wrestles with whether or not actions require condemnation of the whole man or just his actions. The relationships are real: simultaneously complex and simple. They are built out of pain and joy. Luke May dislikes some elements of the past but realizes condemnation of his father is futile. Lukes family may have fallen apart, but he will get along. Reading the novel hurts, but in a way that you know things will be okay.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)