Summer of the Redeemers: A Novel - Softcover

Haines, Carolyn

4.15

271 ratings by Goodreads

9780452274020: Summer of the Redeemers: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452274028 ISBN 13: 9780452274020

Publisher: Plume, 1995

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A lazy summer in 1963 in rural Mississippi becomes a watershed for thirteen-year-old Bekkah, when a secretive religious cult comes to town, along with a mysterious single woman with a predilection for young boys. Reprint.

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About the Author:

Carolyn Haines is the USA Today bestselling author of more than seventy books, including the popular Sarah Booth Delaney Mississippi Delta mystery series. A native of Mississippi, Haines writes in multiple genres. She’s a recipient of the 2010 Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing and the 2009 Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. She has also been honored by Suspense Magazine and Romantic Times for best mystery series. The Book of Beloved is the first book in her new series, Pluto’s Snitch. An animal advocate, Haines founded a small 501c3 rescue, Good Fortune Farm Refuge. She cares for nine dogs, nine cats, and six horses.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A coming-of-age novel set in rural Mississippi during the 1960s offers up such potentially juicy elements as racial strife, religious fanaticism, child abuse, and grown-up duplicity, yet proves disappointingly ``young adult'' in perspective and style. Haines, who has written several novels under a pseudonym, takes as her narrator 13-year-old Bekkah Rich, who may look like any other kid living on Kali Oka Road outside of Jexville, Miss., but who is in several significant ways atypical. Daughter of a children's book author and a college professor, Bekkah is destined by brains as well as background for a larger world that few of her playmates will ever see. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1963, that world makes an appearance on Kali Oka Road in two quick, successive strokes: Zombielike members of the Blood of the Redeemer Church move into the abandoned Live for Christ Church quarters nearby; and the old, deserted McInnis plantation is taken over by a shockingly eccentric, bleached-blond horse owner named Nadine Andrews. Curiosity tempts Bekkah to spy on the weird ``Redeemers,'' and her passion for horses leads her to sign up as Nadine's stable hand, despite stern orders from her mother to the contrary. As the summer slowly passes and Bekkah's liberal parents face their own first battles in the civil rights war, the teen discovers horrifying goings-on that seem to include the selling of babies, the beating of children, the torture of animals, the seduction of minors, and, finally, the murder of an innocent child. Haines's evocation of a particular place and time are certainly masterful, but her melodramatic plot is severely hindered by her narrator's early-adolescent point of view. Bekkah's simple heart gets in the way of what might otherwise have been a gripping story, leaving the reader wanting more. (Literary Guild selection; author tour) -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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