The Summer We Got Saved

by Pat Cunningham Devoto

Overview

- Pat Cunningham Devoto's most recent novel, Out of the Night That Covers Me (0-446-52751-3, Warner hard-cover, 1/01), has over 60,000 copies in combined print and was highly praised in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World, among other publications. - My Last Days as Roy Rogers (0-446-52388-7, Warner hardcover, 1/99). Devoto's notable debut, received widespread praise in the Denver Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Kirkus Reviews, among other publications. - Born and raised in North Alabama, Pat Cunningham Devoto taps into her personal experiences and memories of growing up in the changing South to infuse The Summer We Got Saved with astonishing honesty and poignancy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446697156
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	04/10/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.06(d)
Lexile:	830L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

Editorial Reviews

The dawn of integration challenges the Southern smalltown conventions of Bainbridge, Ala., bringing unexpected epiphanies to a cast of loosely connected characters in Devoto's gracefully written new novel. Third-generation farmer Charles Rutland, father of five, watches the family business spiral into debt; as he considers his options, a gubernatorial candidate with a pro-integration message captures his attention and roils local politics. His free-spirited sister, Eugenia, comes to visit and sneaks his two oldest daughters off to Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training camp for civil disobedience and social advocacy. There, Tab and Tina meet Dominique Calder, the biracial Yankee daughter of a divorced Civil Rights movement leader, who exposes the girls to the realities of social injustice. Devoto (My Last Days as Roy Rogers) also chronicles the parallel story of Tab's friend Maudie May, a polio patient at Tuskegee whose Highlander education galvanizes her to start a voter-registration school. While Maudie works to earn her students' trust, Dominique brings Tab to a lunch counter sit-in in Nashville, an experience that forever changes the formerly complacent teen. Devoto's episodic, nonchronological structure creates potent narrative pull, but her evenhanded, affectionate treatment of her complex characters, each struggling to make sense of their changing world, is the novel's greatest asset. Agent, Molly Friedrich. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Adult/High School-Told from three points of view, this thought-provoking story takes place in Alabama and Tennessee during the early 1960s. Tab is a junior high school girl whose primary concerns are nail color and being tolerated by the high school crowd at the local soda shop. Her childhood friend, Maudie, is a black polio victim who wears a leg brace and recently survived a fire at the Tuskegee Polio Institute. Tab's father, Charles, is a hardworking farmer descended from one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. All three lives are dramatically changed by the events of one summer. When Tab and her older sister embark on a secret trip to the Highlander Folk School with their socially conscious aunt, they become unwilling participants in an interracial camp, living with Civil Rights activists. At the same time, Maudie is recruited to help prepare resistant African Americans for voter registration by teaching life skills and reading, and Charles is trying to keep his farm solvent and his family in their accustomed genteel lifestyle while supporting the candidate running against segregationist George Wallace. The stories converge when the main characters experience the tragic consequences of their involvement with integration. The complicated plot might discourage less-serious readers, but this well-written and historically important novel is likely to find a place on this year's "best books" lists.-Pat Bender, The Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Two childhood friends, one white, one black, confront desegregation. In 1954, Tab Rutland, a white girl descended from Klan founders, was separated from her childhood friend Maudie, the black daughter of a neighbor's maid, when Maudie got polio and was sent away for treatment. Here, in her third outing, Devoto (My Last Days as Roy Rogers, 1999) revisits Tab and Maudie and follows them through a summer that will change both forever. Tab and Maudie are out of touch, though Tab's life has gone on much as it had been. She drinks floats downtown. She's reluctant to spend time with Aunt Eugenia, a family oddity whose many eccentricities include traveling to India and living in Berkeley. Yet when Eugenia deposits Tab and her sister Tina at an activist camp in the mountains-and to the frontlines of the Civil Rights movement-Tab is forced to grapple with who she's becoming. Meanwhile, Maudie has spent several years in the colored people's polio hospital growing into a polished teenager with a leg brace and a bit of wanderlust. She doesn't much care about desegregation efforts, but when she hears that a job teaching at a voting school will let her out of the hospital, she returns to a one-room church near her (and Tab's) hometown. As Maudie slowly gains the trust of her congregation, she dares to dream bigger and bigger dreams-among them building a voter-registration float for a town parade. Still, as both Tab and Maudie find, it's dangerous to stir up progressive sentiments, and, despite all the slow drawls and fried peach pies, a very real violence lurks beneath the surface of these sleepy Southern towns. Is the South doomed to remain separated? Are Tab and Maudie? As the summer heats up, thecomplexities deepen, while Tab and Maudie unknowingly circle each other's lives. Nicely woven: Devoto captures the internal ambivalence of a society teetering on the uneasy verge of change.

Kirkus Reviews

This heartfelt novel of the Civil Rights struggle in the small town of Bainbridge, Alabama, in the 1960s turns listeners' expectations upside down and inside out. Narrator Katie Firth expertly navigates this story of teenaged girls politicized into action against racial segregation. One of the most colorful, evocative, and tension-filled scenes takes place at a Nashville lunch counter, where conflict comes simply from sitting at a counter and ordering a hot dog. Firth underplays the accents and helps listeners clearly identify each of the varied personalities. A tragic ending will long be remembered. R.O. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

JUN/JUL 06 - AudioFile