This dual timeline story takes place in Round Hill, North Carolina, and alternates between 1965 - when the civil rights movement rocked the south; and 2010 - when ghosts of the past come home to roost.
*****
In 2010, Shadow Ridge Estates is a new housing development on a picturesque block in Round Hill, North Carolina. The biggest and most beautiful home on the street, designed by architects Kayla and Jackson Carter......
nestles among a copse of trees at the end of the road.
The Carters built the house for themselves, their 4-year-old daughter Rainie, and any future children they might have.
The house was almost complete when Jackson Carter fell down a set of steps and sustained a fatal injury. Jackson's wife Kayla was grief-stricken, but decided she and little Rainie would take up residence in the house anyway, to honor Jackson's memory.
Kayla is almost completely moved in when she gets a visit from an obviously disguised woman who tells Kayla it's bad luck to live in the house.
Kayla and little Rainie move in anyway, and sinister things start to happen - like bogus phone calls and trash being strewn across the lawn.
The only OLD house that remains on Kayla's street is a deteriorating southern home owned by disabled, seventyish Buddy Hockley, who refuses to sell.
Right now Buddy lives in the house with his elderly mother and his sister Ellie Hockley - who returned from San Franciso after 45 years to care for her family.
The story skips back and forth between 2010 and 1965, when then 20-year-old Ellie Hockley was a pharmacology major at the University of North Carolina.
Ellie was home for summer break when she became aware that the SCOPE project was sending college students to the South to help Negroes (the polite term for black people in 1965) register to vote.
Having been influenced by her liberal Aunt Carol (who married into the family), Ellie decides to join SCOPE. Ellie's mother, father, brother, and godfather are APPALLED and try every which way to stop her, saying things like: Negro people are happy with the way things are; there will be strong backlash from white people; she might get hurt; and so on. Ellie's mother even tells her the Ku Klux Klan is really just a social club, because people like to belong to something.
Ellie feels compelled to join SCOPE anyway, and the program - which involves singing freedom songs; staging demonstrations; and going door to door in Negro neighborhoods to convince people to register to vote - exhilarates her.
Ellie makes new friends, including young black college students. Any co-mingling between blacks and whites - especially black males and white females - horrifies racist southerners, and SCOPE workers are taught to run and hide from vehicles driven by white men, who might shoot them.
After a a month, there's a terrible tragedy in the SCOPE program, and Ellie is so upset she moves to San Francisco.
Now that Ellie is back in North Carolina, she aims to learn the whole truth about what happened in 1965. However there are people in Round Hill who want to hide the facts, and this has consequences for both Ellie and Kayla.
The book provides a visceral picture of white resistance to civil rights, and the behavior of Klan members is stomach-churning at times. Sadly, some of the activities depicted are similar to what's happening in the country today, showing we still have a ways to go.
This is an excellent dual historic/contemporary novel, highly recommended.
Thanks to Netgalley, Diane Chamberlain, and St. Martin's Press for a copy of the book.
Rating: 4 stars
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