** spoiler alert ** I'm not sure the one-word review is really doing it. For so many books I have more to say, and one word is kind of unfair. So...I liked a lot of things about this. I thought it was interesting that Revoyr chose to use a non-white child narrator to approach this topic--American race relations in the 1960s and 1970s. I thought many of her descriptions of small-town Midwestern life, its conservatism and deep rootedness, its virtues and its evils, were terrific. I thought she did a great job evoking the nostalgia that adults feel for their childhoods, however flawed they were.

But I was skeptical of the high drama of the climax; it felt engineered and unreal. And in the end I was uncomfortable with how the black characters were used. To some extent the story failed to make them real people in real situations--they were described in terms of their skin color, their handsomeness/beauty, their patience and fortitude--even, at one point, a dazzling smile. Revoyr makes a point of having her narrator reflect back on those childhood observations to say that she couldn't know them very well, as full people, because she was just a child and she was caught up in admiration, awe, fear, etc. That feels like a dodge to me. Moreso because of the horrific climax, which felt to me both a bit exploitative and at the same time highly staged. I didn't need things to get as bad as they got to understand the book's basic message: that people we love can be racist, can do evil things, can be flawed. The extreme scenes at the end of the book felt dictated by a desire to show this as dramatically as possible--which in turn felt like overkill at the expense of the black characters, who were literally written off the page as silent victims of atrocity.

So. There's a lot to admire here--I particularly like the low-key way Revoyr drops sexuality into her adult narrator's tale, without waving any rainbow flags--but there's also a lot that troubled me. I'll try her again--she's doing a lot of things that I think are interesting, and she has a few other books that are highly praised.

Single word: dramatic?