Twelve year old Robbie Stevens grows up under the Jim Crow laws of northern Florida. It’s the 1950s, and though the institution of slavery has been abolished nearly a century ago, in practice, life is tough, especially since Robbie’s mother has died and Robbie’s father, a community organiser, has been branded a rabble rouser by the town’s white population and has fled for Chicago, leaving Robbie in the care of his sixteen year old sister Gloria. When Gloria is accosted by her wealthy white neighbour’s son, he steps in and gives the older boy a half-hearted kick to the knee. The town won’t stand for it, and Robbie is sentenced to six months in a nearby reformatory. Life in the reformatory is hard enough, but Robbie soon discovers that something even more insidious is going on.
I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while now. I like horror, especially if it’s well-written and it thinks outside the box, which this book definitely does. I don’t know why I didn’t like it more than I did, but it failed to grab me and I skimmed through the last few chapters. I couldn’t really tell you why; the novel is suffused with a sense of dread, and I did genuinely feel for poor Robbie. The things that go in the institution are horrible enough of their own right; the horror here is both supernatural and based on real life. We all know the stories of reformatories, boarding schools, orphanages, Magdalen laundries and what have you, where the callous disregard for human dignity led to piles of bones stashed underneath the foundation, in a nearby forest, or in shallow unmarked graves. Yet it’s also this mix that didn’t work for me; it’s too much. The novel would’ve been fine without the supernatural element. As southern gothic goes, it’s a bit over the top.
Some chapters have been written from Robbie’s perspective; others from Gloria’s as she does what she can to free Robbie. Needless to say, the town doesn’t appreciate this, and she does the best she can in the face of an increasingly angry town that considers her to be a troublemaker because of who her father is. The message is clear: keep your head down, know your place, and Gloria is very aware of what happens to black people who don’t live by the rules the white people set for them. Those chapters, however, feel repetitive and disrupt the flow of the novel. Gloria, at a mere sixteen years old, has had to grow up quickly, and though she’s smart, her character also feels a bit robotic; her only objective is to get Robbie out, and that’s where her personality stops.
Ultimately, though, this feels like nitpicking. It probably is a very good book; perhaps I just picked it the wrong time to start reading it (i.e. on a bus with eighty students on a school trip to Berlin). For this reason, I’m going to skip giving this one a rating because that feels unfair. It’s a solid effort; it just wasn’t for me.
I am ordering it for the school library, though.