Gain Access The Twelve-Mile Straight Narrated By Eleanor Henderson Accessible In Digital Version

of the great joys of reading is discovering an debut author whose work just blows you away, Eleanor Henderson did that to me with hernovel Ten Thousand Saints, set inNew York City and Vermont, It is such an amazing book made into a movie in, I put it on my Most Compelling Books oflist,

I was thrilled to hear that Henderson would be at the Book Expo this year signing copies of her followup novel, The TwelveMile Straight.
I was first in a long line of people, all eager to tell her how much we loved Ten Thousand Saints and how we couldn't wait to read this new one.


The setting for The TwelveMile Straight is a small town in Depressionera rural Georgia in, Young Elma Jessup gives birth to two babies one black, one white, Her daughter is the child of the grandson of the wealthy man who owns the farm that her sharecropper father Juke works, Elma and Juke accuse a young black man who works for Juke, Genus Jackson, of raping Elma resulting in Elma's son,

Juke, who made moonshine on the side that he sold to men in the town, convinced others to join him in making Genus pay by lynching him, dragging his body behind a truck and leaving it in the road in town.
The death scene is horrific, and we soon learn that there is more to this story,

Elma's mother died when she was a baby, and Elma was raised by Ketty, their black housekeeper, Ketty's daughter Nan grew up with Elma, and they were best friends, even though Elma went to school and Nan worked with Ketty, eventually learning from her how to be a midwife.


As the story unfolds, we find out that there are many secrets in this house, secrets that will affect everyone who lives there for years to come.
People are curious about Elma's two babies, and their two different fathers, and Elma eventually meets a doctor, Oliver, who wants to study this unique phenomenon.


Oliver is a terrific character he suffers from polio and he wants to be a research doctor, He is fascinated and compassionate towards Elma and her babies, There is a couple, Sarah and Jim, who came from up North and work on Juke's land, Why they are there is a mystery, but they provide company for Elma, for which she is grateful, And gentle, quiet Genus is such a sweet young man, his murder is devastating,

There are some powerful scenes in the story, including a baptism for the babies, where several townsfolk turn out believing that at least one of the babies "has the devil in him.
" Oliver's memory of his time spent on a ship filled with other polio patients because people feared catching polio was heartbreaking,

Henderson creates such a sense of time and place, you can feel the blazing summer sun and see the dust kicking up on the twelvemile straight road.
The reader is transported to this world, one that she conjured from stories her father told of his growing up, one of eight children born to a sharecropper.


Her writing is so precise, it feels like she worked to craft the perfect sentence for each paragraph, I got so lost in The TwelveMile Straight that frequently I found myself completely tuning out my surroundings, losing all track of time and place.


But it is the relationship between Elma and Nan that is at the heart of this emotional, moving story, The two women are as close as sisters, but it is the secrets between them that drive the momentum of the book to its shattering conclusion.


I highly recommend The TwelveMile Straight, and if you haven't read Ten Thousand Saints, pick that one up too, I'm not the only one who feels this way, The TwelveMile Straight has made many Best of Fall lists, Set in the deep South of Georgia, this expertly written novel brings to light's troubled times, We are intimately shown the complex relationships between a wealthy landowner, his hired farm hand and his negro housekeeper as well as their families.
The characters are so complex and multilayered, You feel for them sometimes and can sympathize while other men are just true monsters, So well written I felt like I was part of the world they lived in, One lie to protect the name of the farm hand spirals out of control and ruins so many lives, This epic novel changes so many perceptions, Florence , Georgia, Cotton County, The Twelve Mile Straight road in's , depressed times on a farm, Lynching and racism that makes you sick, women abused, deception and lies and secrets, some genuinely evil people, In the midst of it all a "colored" and a white baby are born, They called them Gemini twins, and they wanted you to believe they were born of the same mother at the same time but of two fathers and because of that lie a man is lynched.
Up front I have to say this is dark, gruesome, sad and brutal, It was hard to read but more than likely so reflective of the time and place and so important not to forget that as atrocious as things were , this was what happened in that time and place.
Even with that, why was I was compelled to keep reading I've given up on books that were hard to take before but I just had to find out what happens to the innocent children.
I was also compelled by the writing, Even with the third person narrative, the thoughts, motivations of the main characters are readily reflected, Chapters move back and forth in time before the babies were born and even before that to the earlier lives of the adults and the transitions were fairly smooth.
The past sheds light on the present, My complaints : it's a little too long atpages and the secrets revealed in the end were obvious much earlier in the book.


It's a real saga of families, black and white, a time of historical shame when black women were controlled and abused by white men, when the white women had little or no control of their lives.
You can read the book description and some other reviews for more specifics on the story and the characters, I'll just say that

if you're up for a gritty, gut punching read of what I would say is historically significant, then I'd recommend it.
There is within some love to offset the things that happen,.but I have to round up,

I received an advanced copy of this book from Ecco/HarperCollins through Edelweiss, Egalley provided through the generosity of Edelweiss, Ecco Publishing and Author, Eleanor Henderson, to be published September,, A shoutout to sitelinkBookseller, Charles Bottomley of Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, Vermont for his recommendation of this forthcoming book,

Eyebrows are raised and tongues are wagging as well you might think they would be when you hear the premise of this story set ins Cotton County, Georgia.
Elma Jessup, the unmarried pregnant daughter of a sharecropper labors in delivering a lightskinned girl and a darkskinned boy, Even the unpaved twelvemile straight, so named due to the exactness of this description, cant separate the nosiness of her righteous neighbors and what is not their business.
This birthing of innocents leads to long reaching and tragic events in a South struggling with racial issues, Eleanor Henderson wrings this character driven saga of motherhood and parentage every which way only a talented author can, Are the babies, Wilson and Winnafred a blessing or curse Can the sins of the fathers ever truly be forgotten much less forgiven Compellingly written, I could not put it down.
White nonsense. Also Im sick to DEATH of reading about women being passively raped and black women being passive victims of psychological and physical abuse at the hands of white men.
Its set postabolition so at first I was drawn in, thinking it would be something new, but the minute I realised it was another white author writing for white audiences it was eyeroll city.
At what point does the narrative of slaves/postsegregation/white authors using the language of colonialism/wide scale tolerated rape set in the Deep South become oversaturated I want women to write NEW narratives! I want women to be the centre of narratives that dont rest solely on them being the mothers to children of rape!!! I wanna see black women be the lead in their own stories rather than relying on white women to literally in this case do their talking for them!!!! And maybe if we WRITE our Male characters with a little more moral compass it might have trickle down effect into our society.
Although I wont hold my breath on that one,

Raping their way through entire villages and tearing apart families doesnt end well for the men at least since it all ends up in a ludicrous blood bath.
Find all my book reviews, plus fascinating author interviews, exclusive guest posts and book extracts, on my blog: sitelink wordpress. com/

The book is written in a distinctive narrative style which conjures up the period and location in which it is set.
From its immensely powerful opening chapter, the book tells a story of poverty, cruelty, prejudice and secrets,

There were things no one wanted known by the outside, and no one knew that better than Elma,
Although it would be unfair to describe it as a miseryfest, its certainly the case that for the characters in The TwelveMile Straight happiness is rare and, where it exists, it is often fleeting.

The book depicts a situation in which power over livelihoods, housing, even life and death, is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals.
Its a world in which corruption or the complicity of officialdom allows a blind eye to be turned to their misdeeds, And, notably, its a patriarchal society where women are viewed as domestic slaves and sexual objects to be used and abused, For too many of the people who live in the environs of the TwelveMile Straight their experience of life is one of grinding poverty, backbreaking labour, disease, alcohol abuse and early death.


The storyline weaves back and forth in time giving the reader the back stories of characters and their different perspectives on events.
I enjoyed The TwelveMile Straight if enjoyed is quite the right word given the experiences of most of its characters but think I would have appreciated it just as much had it been aroundpages shorter.


I received a review copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers Harper Collins UK/th Estate in return for an honest and unbiased review.


This got off to an emotive start with the lynching of a young black man accused of raping a white girl who has given birth to twin babies, one white, one black.
But this implausible scenario is just the start of a tale which feels predictable, overly melodramatic, and too long, With a narrative which moves back and forth in time and with extended back stories to new characters, the plot seems to circle and stall rather than progress.


The themes, too, can be ticked off on one hand: rape, violence, patriarchy, racism, misogyny, . . All important issues, for sure, but they're too pat here, used for dramatic effect rather than real insight, The twisted relationships feel contrived and the writing is somehow distanced so that it's difficult to feel involved, There are a lot of books out there about the American South and its oppressive past: this one repeats all the usual tropes and adds nothing new to the mix.
Ugh! I made it through aboutpages and gave up, Too confusing, too boring. I've got better things to do, . . like change the cat box, I don't understand all thesestar ratings, Back to library this one is going, Je viens de le refermer, Quel voyage ! Je vais attendre avant den dire plus, The book was based on Florence, Georgia, Cotton County, The Twelve Mile Straight road in's, depressed times on a farm, Lynching and racism that makes you sick, women abused, deception and lies and secrets, some genuinely evil people, In the midst of it all a "coloured" and a white baby are born, They called them Gemini twins, and they wanted you to believe they were born of the same mother at the same time but of two fathers and because of that lie a man is lynched.
Up front I have to say this is dark, gruesome, sad and brutal, It was hard to read but more than likely so reflective of the time and place and so important not to forget that as atrocious as things were , this was what happened in that time and place.
Even with that, why was I was compelled to keep reading I've given up on books that were hard to take before but I just had to find out what happens to the innocent children.
I was also compelled by the writing, Even with the third person narrative, the thoughts, motivations of the main characters are readily reflected, Chapters move back and forth in time before the babies were born and even before that to the earlier lives of the adults and the transitions were fairly smooth.
The past sheds light on the present, My complaints : it's a little too long atpages and the secrets revealed in the end were obvious much earlier in the book.


It's a real saga of families, black and white, a time of historical shame when black women were controlled and abused by white men, when the white women had little or no control of their lives.
You can read the book description and some other reviews for more specifics on the story and the characters, I'll just say that if you're up for a gritty, gut punching read of what I would say is historically significant, then I'd recommend it.
There is within some love to offset the things that happen,.but I have to round up, .