Spite fences
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Booklist Review
Gr. 8-12. Thirteen-year-old Maggie Pugh has lived in Kinship, Georgia, all her life, biking along its paved and dirt streets with her friend Pert and buying odds and ends from Zeke, a black trader who is a fixture in town. But the summer of 1960 is different: Zeke has given Maggie a camera, a tool that allows her to focus in on what life in Kinship is really like and helps her to see the physical abuse she suffers from her mother as being unnatural. "Mamas don't act like that," she states. Likewise, Maggie gradually perceives the horror of the abuse that Zeke and others in Kinship's black community are facing at the hands of a particularly cruel and bigoted group of white citizens. Only through the anonymity of photography and a conscious effort to capture single events in focus through the camera's lens is Maggie able to face the evil around her. The courage she musters to stand up to her mother and to her vile teenage neighbor Virgil Boggs is the same courage Maggie will need to help the black community gain its freedom. A superbly crafted first novel, despite a rather abrupt conclusion, this is a difficult book to read. The abuse of both Maggie and the black community is graphic. Not only is Maggie physically--and psychologically--harmed by her mother, but she also is menaced constantly by Virgil, an escalating torment that eventually results in her almost being raped. Even today the story's premise is controversial: Maggie is a 13-year-old white girl whose friendships within the black community threaten an entire society's way of life. The courage and vision of the 1960s South, as well as its ugliness, are posted on Spite Fences for all to see. It is a masterful, sobering display. ~--Frances Bradburn
Publisher's Weekly Review
"This painfully realistic first novel evokes tensions in the South at the brink of the civil rights movement," said PW in a starred review. Ages 12-up. (Sept.) r (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
School Library Journal Review
Gr 7-10-Thirteen-year-old Maggie Pugh lives in a nation poised for great social change, a community deadlocked between those who need that change and those who will use all force against it. It is 1960 and Kinship, Georgia, has become one small battleground in the black struggle for civil rights. Maggie's involvement in the political and social events swirling around her is driven by her need to escape her abusive mother and dysfunctional household, her budding social conscience, and her aesthetic eye as a photographer. Actress Kate Forbes' gently Southern intonations ably mirror author Trudy Krisher's narrative (Doubleday, 1995), bringing the scenes of small town existence both its neighborliness and its ugly brutality to life for listeners. Maggie is a strong character and must be, for in the course of the story of this one summer, she must confront racial intolerance that is both social and violent, personal physical attack on herself and on her little sister by the same bully she witnessed beating her elderly black friend, and her capacity to become an activist with her camera. There are many intense and intensely horrible scenes in this award-winning novel including the sexual violation of Maggie's elderly male friend but Maggie's story is realistic, provoking thought and interest in a period of our cultural history without turning it into a soap opera.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
While dealing with her dysfunctional family and racist neighbors, thirteen-year-old Maggie struggles with prejudice and injustice in her small Georgia town. Poor and white, Maggie develops friendships with two black activists, then witnesses the horrible beatings both receive. The suspenseful story of the civil-rights era provides a believable, courageous heroine. From HORN BOOK 1994, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Book Review
Maggie Pugh, a 13-year-old white girl, lives in the ironically named town of Kinship, Ga., in 1960. After witnessing the brutal beating of Zeke, a black man with whom she becomes close and who gives Maggie her only prized possession--a camera--Maggie realizes that the lives of the black people of Kinship are intolerable. Maggie's own life is unbearable, as well. Her mother, physically and emotionally abusive towards Maggie and her father, showers all the love and attention that she is capable of on Maggie's pageant- winning younger sister, Gardenia; Maggie's trashy next-door neighbor, Virgil Boggs, taunts Maggie and then attempts to rape her; and she must clean the house of a stranger to make money for herself and her family. But the stranger turns out to be a fine man, a great friend and mentor, and black. Because of her association with him, Maggie takes control of her circumstances and surroundings. Armed only with her camera against violence and injustice, she will record the truth of what happens around her. Many ``spite fences'' have been built in Kinship; they separate blacks from whites, Baptists from Roman Catholics, and children from their parents. Through Krisher's (Kathy's Hats, 1992) stunning narrative and achingly real characters, Maggie's pain and redemption are brought to vivid life. (Fiction. 12+)