Starred Review Alabama in the 1960s was still in denial about the civil rights movement. Tab Rutland proudly proclaimed that Cousin John Lester was one of the founding members of the Klu Klux Klan. Her sister, Tina, was too interested in makeup and boys to bother with history or politics. And their father would back the same tired candidate for governor because that's what his kinfolk always did--until Aunt Eugenia visits from California and talks the girls into going to visit a wealthy cousin in Chattanooga. On the way, she admits that her real plan is to educate the girls by taking them to the Highlander Folk School once attended by Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. There Tab is introduced to nonviolent protests and the lies told by both white and black. And back home, their father breaks with tradition and backs a new candidate for governor who just might beat Wallace. This is a wonderfully poignant, funny, and intelligent book about coming-of-age and wisdom. The narrative never becomes preachy, and all the characters are realistically flawed and completely delightful.

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, the complexities 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.

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.