Freshwater Road
Published on 26. May 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
346 pages
978-1-57284-195-6 (ISBN)
Description
From award-winning actress Denise Nicholas: a ten-year anniversary reissue of her powerful and dramatic coming of age story set in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Freshwater Road has been called one of the best novels written about the Civil Rights Movement. Nicholas herself has been praised repeatedly over the years for her beautiful prose and is continually mentioned along with Alice Walker and Ernest J. Gaines as the most important novelists documenting this era. When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she's assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the South represents. Finding inner strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her adult students for their showdown with the county registrar.
All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer. By summer's end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the questions that preoccupy her-about violence and nonviolence, about race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family bonds. In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an unforgettable story that-more than ten years after first appearing in print-continues to be one of the most cherished works of Civil Rights fiction.
All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer. By summer's end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the questions that preoccupy her-about violence and nonviolence, about race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family bonds. In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an unforgettable story that-more than ten years after first appearing in print-continues to be one of the most cherished works of Civil Rights fiction.
Reviews / Votes
Praise for Denise Nicholas's Freshwater Road: "Surely the best work of fiction about the civil rights movement since Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman." --The Washington Post "Breathtaking... Perhaps the best work of fiction ever done about the civil rights movement." --Newsday (New York) "What a wonderful surprise Denise Nicholas's first novel is. Her textured characters unfold against the background of an historic encounter that was destined to change America forever." --Sidney Poitier "Hypnotic... [Nicholas] conjures an insidious mood of fear and writes with lyrical prose." --Entertainment Weekly "Tensions both physical and psychic inform Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas, which may well be the finest novel about the civil-rights era... Perhaps Nicholas's experience as an actress is what endowed her writing with its deep understanding of plot and character. Whatever the source of her talents, in my reading experience, few books have so artfully entwined a coming-of-age saga with the awakening of moral conscience." --Samuel G. Freedman, The Daily Beast "In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas brings alive all the colors and emotions of the civil rights movement during the perilous adventure that was Freedom Summer." --Janet Fitch, White Oleander "Sometimes gorgeous, sometimes terrifying, this novel marks the debut of a talented writer." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Vividly depicts the cost of activism... Nicholas has a genuine way with words, a keen grasp of visual and emotional metaphor, and the novel illuminates the internal consequences of institutionalized racism and the often suppressed connections between South and North." --Chicago Tribune "With spare, powerful sentences that quietly sneak up on you, Nicholas smoothly transports us to the not-so-distant past for a reflection of the civil rights movement's subtle triumphs." --Essence "Extraordinary... Impassioned prose, full-blooded characters, and rich feeling." --PAGES "A lovely and arresting novel about class and race in the South." --Time Out Chicago "Offers a sensitive and absorbing story of a young woman coming of age emotionally and racially." --Vanessa Bush, Booklist "A finely realized and written novel." --Detroit Free Press "Accomplished... Nicholas appears poised to have an equally successful second career as a novelist." --Chicago Reader "Vivid, intricate, and powerful; a book that will make you squirm with discomfort and dread, breathe with relief, then gasp with outrage. The characters in this book are so real and the events of that Mississippi summer are so well described that i almost felt like I was reading a history book instead of a novel. Pick up a copy of this incredible book. If you ask me what one novel to read this winter, Freshwater Road gets my vote." --Terri Schlichenmeyer, syndicated columnistMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago, IL
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 149 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
380 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-57284-195-6 (9781572841956)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
11/2020
1st Edition
Agate Bolden
from
€25.99
Available for download
Person
Denise Nicholas is an actor and writer who has starred in numerous films and TV shows, including Room 222, for which she earned three Golden Globe nominations, and In the Heat of the Night, for which she also wrote several episodes. She lives in Southern California and is currently at work on a memoir.