Publisher's Synopsis
In 1963, Simon Klein and his family, Jews from St. Paul, Minnesota, moved to the small town of Pickettville, Alabama, where Simon must finish his senior year in high school. He is as mystified of the South as Southerners are of a Jew. While gathering information for a story he is writing for his high school paper, he becomes friends with Cecilia Goodwin, a Black girl. They have much in common, talking about the Civil Rights movement, literature, the looming Vietnam War, and, of course, football while sitting on her porch swing, Southern tradition. They eventually become romantically involved but must keep their relationship a secret, until both of them decide they have had enough of the South's social restrictions and take the risk of putting their romance on public display, to Simon's mother's delight, but to the angry epithets of so many others. This is the year that Governor George Wallace declared, "Segregation forever!" Told by Simon many years later, this coming-of-age Southern novel foretells the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and America's deepening involvement in the Vietnam War, all while Simon's parent's marriage falls apart, and he learns of the corruption, nepotism, and xenophobia of small-town Alabama of that era, a state that he now looks back on with fond memories, as he came to understand the scheming and prejudices of many and experienced a life-changing romance.
