Freshwater Road

Starred review from July 11, 2005
In her rich, absorbing debut, actress Nicholas (Room 222
; In the Heat of the Night
) follows a young woman South to "trench Mississippi, gutbucket Mississippi" during the summer of 1964. The daughter of a Detroit bar owner/numbers runner and his estranged, class-conscious ex-wife (whose light complexion enables her to pass as white), Celeste Tyree has enjoyed a comfortable, sheltered middle-class life for all of her nearly two decades. But when activists talking of nonviolent revolution visit her Ann Arbor college campus, she determines to go South to help register blacks to vote. It's a decision she shares with her stern father, Shuck, in a "By the time you read this" letter, and Shuck's self-identification as a race man wars with his concern for his daughter. Part of what drives wide-eyed Northerner Celeste is her sense that her life little matches common black experience; her work in Mississippi is an attempt to validate her identity as a black woman as much as it is a journey to help lift the veil of oppression. Nicholas tests her protagonist's mettle in multiple ways, and Celeste finds previously untapped reserves of strength, learning lessons about activism and secrets about her own family. Sometimes gorgeous, sometimes terrifying, this novel marks the debut of a talented writer. Agent, William Reiss. 10-city tour
.

September 15, 2005
This uneven debut novel about the Civil Rights era mostly relates the experiences of Celeste Tyree, a black 19-year-old college student who naï vely and courageously travels to the South to take part in the 1964 summer campaign to register disenfranchised African American voters in Mississippi. The narrated events in Mississippi alternate with a distracting subplot about Celeste's successful night club -owning father in Detroit. In its most effective parts, the novel clearly conveys the idealistic determination and heroism of the young volunteers and the local Mississippians who took part in the campaign as well as the awful fear that pervaded the segregated South at the time. But its prose style fluctuates between the mundane and a kind of forced baroque, while too many characters border on -or in fact are -one-dimensional. With the recent trial and conviction of one of the white racist murderers of three Civil Rights workers from that summer as well as the reopening of other long-dormant murder cases, this book is timely. But problems with its style, characterization, and focus hold it back. Recommended for public and academic libraries where interest warrants. [Nicholas is an actress who starred in the TV series "Room 222" and "In the Heat of the Night." -Ed.] -Roger A. Berger, Everett Community Coll., WA

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