Another book club has invited me to join them for the summer and this is their current choice. I don't know how they choose. I have been trying to decide if it would be suitable for our book club, I think it would not offend the nice ladies, but I could be mistaken. The setting is split between the thirties and the present and deals with a relationship between a young white girl and the son of their black housekeeper, including long term consequences.
It doesn't have a nice neat happy ending; it would be hard to imagine that in the time and place - which is actually the midwest, not the south - but it does all wrap up a little too nicely for actual probability. I guess that's all right, it is fiction, after all, even though the writer claims that the idea came from her research into her own family history (or was that the hangman book?).
It is inevitable to compare this book to The Help and, since I just read it, to The Queen of Palmyra. Of course, there is the obvious racial issue, but those are both set in the sixties in the vicinity of the civil rights movement; this one is a generation earlier. The Help is about the interactions between white and black women: women of privilege and their servants. The Queen of Palmyra is about a white child and the black women who raise her. Calling Me Home is about a man and a woman, who are young and naive enough to believe that love can win over societal norms.
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