![]() ![]() Natchez, Mississippi, in the civil rights era It was 1967, smack in the middle of the Civil Rights era, when Jim Crow laws were still enforced (even though the Civil Rights Act had passed in 1964), the Klu Klux Klan periodically swooped down upon towns instilling fear. Her father, who was a doctor, opened a clinic (her father is largely absent from the narrative and one gets the feeling that he was emotionally absent from the family’s lives as well). Here’s a quick run-down of the book : When she was ten years old, Jo Invester’s family moved to a small, poverty-stricken, all-black Mississippi town in the heart of the cotton fields. Ivester flirts with these feelings but then quickly pulls back. ![]() And sometimes, seeing a person in their worst light, feeling their despair and challenges and struggles, is what makes a memoir really shine. It’s not that I didn’t trust the voice, it’s that I felt that the author worked too hard to show the narrator in the best light. The frustrations stemmed from passages that didn’t sound authentic. I read it in one day (it was a raining-hard-with-tornado-warnings-staying-inside-and-reading sort of day). On the other hand, there were parts I found frustrating. ![]() I finished this book a few days ago and on one hand, I loved it. The Outskirts of Hope, Jo Ivester, 2015: She Writes Press, 238 pages ![]()
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