One Mississippi (Mark Childress)

I have a bizzare fascination with the South which, I've concluded, stems from three things. First, I grew up in Idaho which, surprising as it sounds, was settled by Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War, mostly from the border states (i.e. Ohio and Missouri). Second, both sides of my family immigrated to the U.S. via the south (most recently, my great grandfather from Ireland to New Orleans to Texas to Idaho...talk about repeated culture shock). And, finally, my mom's youngest sister married into a nice, blue blood Alabama family and raised my cousins in Atlanta (who started calling me a Yankee when they were, like, three years-old). So, when I saw this in the New Book selection, I thought it would be a fun, interesting piece of fiction to start the year. Well, it is definitley fun (at least, by my standards, which can be pretty twisted), as I was laughing out loud thru the last half. And, any book that leads to a Google search ("Mississippi didn't enforce racial school integration until the 1970's??? Really?? Oh my God!") has to be classified as interesting. It's the classic "fish out of water" meets "coming of age" tale. A teenage boy, Daniel, and his family move from Indiana to Mississippi in 1973. Among other plot lines, Daniel joins a Baptist amateur musical group who perform a musical written by the local choir director called, simply, Christ! and includes such musical lines as, "I'm just a boy with two dads, One is a carpenter, he is so sad, One is a Father I never see, he's up in heavan waiting for me." Daniel faces many of the stereotypes and situations faced by every Yankee who's crossed the Mason-Dixon line since 1965.