Swimming Between Worlds.
Elaine Orr. Penguin
Publishing Group. Copyright 2018. pb. 416 pp.; ISBN: 9780698406384.
Tacker
is an engineering student who graduated and went to work with a notable
engineering firm in Nigeria, Africa. A
man who fully embraces every thing he did and does, he wound up being fired and
sent back to America. His fault? Getting too close to the native Nigerians,
embracing their culture, innocently embracing religious and other rituals, and
supposedly consorting in a physical relationship with a Nigerian. Shades of Jim Crow extending its tentacles
overseas. Tacker comes back to his home
town, embarrassed, confused and even angry about his failed career. His family really don’t know what happened
but stand by Tacker and eventually offer him management of the family’s small
grocery store in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
While
working, Tacker meets Kate Monroe, a gal is who recovering from the death of
her parents and who then discovers the momentous secret of her parents’
marriage that shocks her to bits. The
trauma is so deep and harsh that she is not sure she can ever trust anyone
again, and that includes Tacker who seems to have his own secrets.
The
plot picks up with the entrance of an African-American, Gaines Townson. He is accepted to work at the grocery store
where he does his best to work hard and remain unnoticed. But Gaines is part of the new wage of
rebellion, willing to risk arrest and even death for trying to break the Jim
Crow laws. Tacker actually accompanies
him on one of these potentially volatile scenes in which Gaines dares to sit at
a whites-only luncheon counter. On and
on these scenarios progress with eventual success but also accompanied by
violence and death.
How
to these characters develop? One could
call this a coming-of-age novel but the characters are only coming of age with
the recognition and ownership of vital truths about humans and how they treat
each other. It’s all about love, hate,
loyalty and betrayal. It’s an American
historical novel which leaves as many questions as answers in the reader’s
mind.
Highly
recommended historical fiction!
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