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Darktown (Darktown, #1)

Thomas Mullen

Start date: February 12, 2018

Finish date: March 6, 2018

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Feb 05, 2018 Kim Kaso rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: rw-book-club-finished, 5000-books-lor2018

After a year in which many books tried to be clever in their plotting or narrative viewpoint, along comes a book rich with fully-realized characters, complex and flawed. I responded strongly to them all, I worried about their fates, I recognized their human traits all too well. This is a very enthralling novel, exciting and well-paced, but it is so much more. This author has taken on an important time in our culture and writes about it with clear eyes and compassion. It is a book that transcends After a year in which many books tried to be clever in their plotting or narrative viewpoint, along comes a book rich with fully-realized characters, complex and flawed. I responded strongly to them all, I worried about their fates, I recognized their human traits all too well. This is a very enthralling novel, exciting and well-paced, but it is so much more. This author has taken on an important time in our culture and writes about it with clear eyes and compassion. It is a book that transcends its genre, much as Dennis Lehane’s books do for Boston and New England, and LeCarré does for the world. My son-in-law spent time in Atlanta during his first years of college, and life has improved, but the roots of racism in this country are deep, and not just in the South. There is a possibility of danger for him that is of a different nature than that which faces me or my husband everyday, and it makes my heart ache for him, for friends, for our country. The world Boggs, Smith, and Rakestraw face everyday in 1948 Atlanta is no less dangerous than the time they spent in the military, and it is amazing people took on this important work. For Boggs and Smith and their compatriots, being the first Negro police officers—their oaths specifically used that term—in Atlanta was a case of taking on way more than anyone could imagine, while being expected to fix things for their people on one side, and being set up for failure and treated with contempt and malice on the other. Watching them negotiate the land mines of interaction with people everyday was just as suspenseful as the physical altercations, every encounter ripe with the possibility of at least career-ending disasters, if not actual life-ending ones. And, still, they persisted. Rakestraw, too, risks much in reaching across the race line, working with Boggs and Smith, and refusing to fall in with the casual racism rife in the police force, as well as resisting the corruption. This book will stick with me. Everyone should read it. Most highly recommended. ...more

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Feb 08, 2018 Jeanne rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This was an excellent debut in what I hope will be a series that will last not only to develop the characters further but also to explore several decades in American history. Set in Atlanta, Black officers Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith are compatible to a point but bonded most strongly by being 2 of the first 8 officers on the force. The book is great at showing, not telling, how they are purposely put at several disadvantages compared to white cops but the two officers persevere nonetheless. Whi ...more

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Oct 20, 2020 Diane rated it really liked it

Set in Atlanta, Georgia after World War II. It’s about the first black officers on the Atlanta Police Force and the problems they faced. There is the murder of a black girl, Lily Ellsworth, a few other murders, beatings, corruption and a lost little boy, Horace(who is abandoned by the author and never found).

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