About the Book
- Genres:
- Boy-Girl Romance
- Historical Fiction
- Voices:
- Cis Girl
- White (Non-Specified)
BFF Charm: Yay!
Swoonworthy Scale: -2
Talky Talk: Like Erin When She’s Tired Or Angry
Bonus Factors: Mississippi, Crazy Connections
Relationship Status: Fair Cabin Friend
The Deal:
It’s 1962, and 15-year-old Samantha’s dad has just died in the Vietnam War. Sam and her mom, an art history professor, move to Jackson, Mississippi to be closer to Sam’s dad’s side of the family. An Army Brat from a young age, Sam’s pretty used to packing up and moving around, and while parts of Jackson are strange and unfamiliar, she also has thes weet memories of slow summer evenings spent at her grandparents’ house.
At school she meets Mary Alice McLemore, a girl whom, if you are unfamiliar with the Southern way of life, has to be popular, just cause of her name. (Oh, the amount of Mary Alices I have met in my years.) She also meets Mary Alice’s cute older brother, Stone (short for Stonewall, natch), who, wonder of wonders, seems to have a thing for our Sam.
In fact, life would pretty much be idyllic, if not for the fact thatit’s Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, the fact that Sam’s mom and her new boyfriend Perry insist on shaking things up by assisting Freedom Riders and teaching at Tougaloo, and the fact that Sam finds herself caught in the middle of a war that is scorching a path through Dixie.
BFF Charm: Yay!
How can I not like Sam? She’s the embodiment of half my damn family, after all. She’s got all the typical teenage angst – a reluctant acceptance of her mom’s new beau, a total crush on the cute boy at school even though his family doesn’t approve, a psycho biotch of a teacher, and a desperate desire to be accepted by the popular girl at school. But she has to balance all of that with the increasing tension and violence surrounding her, and weigh doing what’s right against doing what’s easy.
So, Sam, not only will I give you my BFF charm, but I’ll adopt you as well. I think you’ll get along fine in my family, if Christmas at your grandparents’ house is anything to go by. (P.S. please weigh in with your thoughts on boiled peanuts. Oh! And will you eat all my turnip greens so my mom doesn’t scold me?)
Swoonworthy Scale: -2
Yes. I am giving this book’s swoonworthy scale a NEGATIVE TWO. That’s how much I want to punch that cheesehead Stone McLemore in the throat!
I mean, I guess I am judging him harshly. It’s not his fault his dad is in the Klan. And he does like space travel. But I just couldn’t help my overwhelming urge to punch him throughout 97% of this book. He wasn’t worthy of Sam, at any rate, which sort of killed any swoon that could have been.
(However, if I were judging Sam’s mom and Perry, well! SWOON.)
Talky Talk: Like Erin When She’s Tired Or Angry
You know how you can try to hide or change a part of yourself, but it will never really go away? Like, listen, Madonna, you can start speaking with a faux British accent in order to irritate everyone in the world, but I bet when you’re really angry, that old Detroit accent slips out. And the same thing happens to me, only when I’m tired or angry, the Mississippi drawl creeps out like a toddler that’s been kept in the dark too long. (Which is what we do to our toddlers in the South. Keeps ’em tough!)
This book sounds just like me at my most tired and angry, only with slightly more references to Tang. (Only slightly more! TANG I LOVE YOU!) However, it also continuously hovers at the line between natural cadence and Very Important Topic, which made this book seem like something assigned to me by my ninth grade teacher.
Bonus Factors: Mississippi
It may be a little silly to consider Mississippi a bonus factor in this book, considering that a good deal of the book involves the worst part of Mississippi’s history (which is saying something). But Margeret McCullen also paints the Mississippi of my childhood – hot sidewalks and towering pines, cicadas lulling me to sleep and roosters crowing me awake. People may hate Mississippi, and that’s certainly their right, but I bet those same people would have loved playing in the fort my cousins and I built deep in the woods, or spinning around on the stools at the soda fountain counter, or buying hoop cheese, slab bacon and really awesome shoes at the general store. (Seriously. Really awesome shoes.)
Bonus Factor: Crazy Connections!
Y’all, the South, for all its geographical grandeur, is a really small place. Everyone knows everyone else, which can be awesome when you need a cup of sugar/your house burns down, and really unawesome when word gets out that you’ve been participating in marches and sit-ins andthe Klan comes to deface your property and/or kill you.
So much of this book, for me, was like listening to my family tell a story about the ’60s, from momentous events, like the riots at Ole Miss, to day to day things that even they took for granted, like the fact that pretty much everyone who was white had an African-American maid or handyman back then, even if they didn’t have two nickels to rub together. (Including, in this book, Sam and her mother.)
But there were even some crazy connections as well! Like the fact that Sam’s mom taught at a college based on Millsaps College, which the author’s actual mother taught at in the sixties, and which was founded by my ancestor. And the fact that, at one point, Sam’s mother and her boyfriend Perry assist a young Michael Schwerner with a flat tire on his way north towards Philadelphia, MS (again something that actually happened to the author). His body, along with those of his fellow Freedom Riders, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, would later be unearthed by the FBI on a section of land which would shortly fall into the hands of my mother’s high school boyfriend. One of their murderers would go on to tell a young Erin to watch her smart mouth if she knew what was good for her.
Much of this book was almost a call-and-answer for my memory. When Sam hears about riots at Ole Miss over James Meredith’s admission, my mind took me back to being seven years old, as my father pointed out the bullet holes in the columns of the Lyceum and told me about the riots he watched as a child. (Slightly less compelling but a better ice-breaker: my father’s first part-time job of harvesting medicinal marijuana from the research facility at Ole Miss.)
Relationship Status: Fair Cabin Friend
Every year, Philadelphia, Mississippi hosts The Neshoba County Fair, aka Mississippi’s Giant House Party. If you’ve never been to the Neshoba County Fair, I FEEL SORRY FOR YOU. Because it is awesome. Take all the regular awesome things about fairs, like tilt-a-whirls, homemade lemonade, food items on a stick, and combine them with: horse racing, concerts, dances in the middle of the fair, SING A LONGS, and fair cabins. What’s a fair cabin, you ask? Oh, that’s just a two-to-three story townhouse-like structure that YOU LIVE IN. FOR THE ENTIRE FAIR. And it is AWESOME. Have you ever woken up in the morning, stretched your limbs and thought to yourself, “Man, I would love some cotton candy for breakfast,” and then walked outside 10 feet and consumed said cotton candy at nine in the morning? No? WELL I HAVE.
The fair cabins are set up in a kind of neighborhood, little “streets” and “alleys” of cabins that have been passed down through the generations. Suffice it to say, you get to know your neighbors, and a large part of the fair is the excitement of getting to see those people again.
This book is like a friend I made at the fair cabin. I probably won’t see it often, and we don’t really even have that much in common. But it knows what it is like to have fingers sticky from melting snow cones, to have feet stained red from the dirt, to know people and places and to love them, in spite of their flaws, in ways that other people will never understand. We may diverge and choose different paths, but we’ll always have Mississippi.
FTC Full Disclosure: My review copy was a free ARC I received from Houghten Mifflin Harcourt via netgalley.com. I received neither money nor cocktails for writing this review (dammit!). Sources of Light is already available in stores.
