Title: Mississippi Trial, 1955Author: Chris Crowe
As a disclaimer, I think I should say that my review of this book will be a little less than objective, since basically everything I know about fiction I learned from Chris Crowe. He taught my YA novel class last semester, and I'll be forever grateful for his encouragement. Without his belief that we could all accomplish the seemingly-impossible goal of writing a complete novel during a semester, there's no way I could have finished the first draft of mine (which is now sitting on the computer, untouched, since finals ended). Anyway, that said, I felt like I could see Crowe putting into practice many of the things that he taught us about pacing and dialogue and character development.
Mississippi Trial, 1955 centers on Hiram Hillburn, a sixteen-year-old boy living in Arizona who returns to visit his ailing grandfather in the Mississippi town where he spent his early years. He becomes acquainted with Emmett Till, another teenage boy visiting relatives from far away-- the difference is that Hillburn is white, and Till is black. While Hillburn finds a warm welcome in Mississippi, Till gets murdered for being suspected of acting too friendly to a white woman. Hiram soon finds that although the Mississippi residents are friendly to him, they have secrets he'd rather not confront. While the story is, on one level, a historical novel, it connects more with me as a reader as a story of fathers and sons and grandsons and the complicated relationships that they sometimes have.
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