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Book Reviewed by:Winner of the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, a thought-provoking and enchanting debut about a Black woman doing whatever it takes to protect all she loves at the beginning of the civil rights movement in Alabama.
It's 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their "side of the woods." In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup's longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple's expulsion—or worse—from the home they both hold dear. But as Raymond continues to push alternatives for enhancing New Jessup's political power, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town.
Jamila Minnicks's debut novel is both a celebration of Black joy and a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America. Readers of Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half and Robert Jones, Jr.'s The Prophets will love Moonrise Over New Jessup.
One
The moon rises and sets, stitching eternity together, night by night. Love-spun thread binds family when even years, or blue skies, stand between one and another's touch. Generations travel the same footprints, reach hands to the same climbing branches, and warm the same brown skin under the Alabama sun. Maybe "family" brings to mind only blood, marital relations, and it's easy to understand that way of thinking. But love by my hand tethers generations to generations, as well as kin by skin, in this place where all in me, and of me, can thrive.
Yet even the strongest thread will snap with constant tension and no slack. The heavens overflow with memories lost. So as life requires I hold taut and I give. In most ways, my people know, if, in some, they never will. But in all ways, my moon rises and sets for family.
So in eternity, the time had come for me to leave the home where I was born. The sun was setting and the half-bald red sweetgum around the fields announced ...
PEN/Bellwether Prize
2021
Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks is an awakening to the many mindsets around the complexities of desegregation. She presents the nuances of the movement that history books fail to capture (Lorraine D). In addition to fully developed characters, the love story narration and opposing viewpoints of the civil rights movement, the book is beautifully written. "Cool morning air thick with a low autumn fog," "paper with my dried tears and defenses … went up in smoke" and "exhale to release the inside noise" are examples of imagery that fill the pages of this book. I found joy in the imagery and could see and feel and smell and hear as if I were there. Everyone who loves beautiful writing will enjoy this book (Judith M)...continued
Full Review
(703 words)
(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
Barbara Kingsolver
With compelling characters and a heart-pounding plot, Jamila Minnicks pulled me into pages of history I'd never turned before. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of The Revisioners
An immersive and timely recasting of history by a gloriously talented writer to watch. You will fall in love with New Jessup: the town and the book.
Jamila Minnicks' debut novel Moonrise Over New Jessup takes place in an all-Black town in 1950s Alabama. Residents are wary of integration, preferring to exist in their own space rather than being left to contend with racism in a white-dominated society. In an interview with The Rumpus, Minnicks explains that she wanted to write about this type of community because "Towns and places like New Jessup did exist, and many still do … Between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, it is estimated that more than 1,200 Black towns and settlements were founded in the US." She goes on to specify, "New Jessup embodies some of the larger communities that we built for ourselves … places where Black people owned acreage and the community...
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