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Synopsis
"ABSORBING...COMPELLING...HIGHLY SATISFYING."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"TRULY ENGAGING...Campbell has a storyteller's ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place....There's a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis."
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
"REMARKABLE...POWERFUL."
—Time
"YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE is rich, lush fiction set in rural Mississippi beginning in the mid-'50s. It is also a haunting reality flowing through Anywhere, U.S.A., in the '90s....There's love, rage and hatred, winning and losing, honor, abuse; in other words, humanity....Campbell now deserves recognition as the best of storytellers. Her writing sings."
—The Indianapolis News
"EXTRAORDINDARY."
—The Seattle Times
"A COMPELLING NARRATIVE...Campbell is a master when it comes to telling a story."
—Entertainment Weekly YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE won the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work of Fiction
Publishers Weekly
Written in poetic prose, filled with masterfully drawn and sympathetic characters that a less able hand might have rendered in stereotypes, this first novel blends the irony of Flannery O'Connor's fiction and the poignance of Harper Lee's. Moving quickly and believably from the eve of integration in rural Mississippi to the present-day street gangs in Chicago's housing projects, Campbell (Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad) captures the gulf between pre-and post-civil rights America; her story, starting with the murder of a young black man whose trial -- argued before an all-white jury -- captures national attention, shows us how far we have come and yet suggests we have not come so far after all. When word gets out that black teenager Armstrong Todd was talking French to Lily Cox, the Cox men kill him. Clayton Pinochet, the local newspaper reporter whose father is the most powerful and reactionary man in town, secretly tips off the national press; the men are arrested for what in previous times would have been a permissible crime. Their acquittal makes it clear that the system doesn't provide justice, and life never returns to normal for anyone. Details -- the advent of TV, the polio vaccine, a Faulkner novel, Vietnam, women's lib and Oprah! -- add to the rich, textured background.