American Ghost
A Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A complex and compulsively readable novel about how unresolved family history and the racial tensions of the past threaten a love affair between two young Floridians.
Jolie Hoyt is a good Southern girl living in Hendrix, a small Florida Panhandle town. All too aware of her family’s closet full of secrets and long-held distrust of outsiders, Jolie throws caution to the wind when she meets Sam Lense, a Jewish anthropology student from Miami, who is in town to study the ethnic makeup of the region.
Jolie and Sam fall recklessly in love, but their affair ends abruptly when Sam is discovered to have pried too deeply into Hendrix’s dark racial history and he becomes the latest victim in a long tradition of small-town violence. Twelve years later, Jolie and Sam are forced to revisit the unresolved issues of their young love and finally shed light on the ugly history of Jolie’s hometown. A complex and compulsively readable Southern saga, American Ghost is a richly woven exploration of how the events of our past haunt our present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her fourth novel (after The Schooling of Claybird Catts), Owens takes on an ugly subject and largely succeeds with an engrossing story. Based on the last reported lynching in America, Owens relocates the history to a tiny Florida town, where, in 1938, Henry Kite, a black man, was lynched after shooting a Jewish storekeeper. Decades later, the storekeeper's great-grandson, Sam, a graduate student in anthropology, arrives to investigate the lynching. Things get complicated when he falls for Jolie, a Pentecostal preacher's daughter whose family are thought of as "inbred hillbillies." In the town of Hendrix, everyone knows everything, and tongues wag over Jolie's catching herself a "rich Jew." Then, while hunting with her brothers, Sam is shot. As he recuperates, Jolie flees, believing he was only using her for the investigation. The two don't meet again until a decade later when another investigator becomes interested in the lynching. A thwarted romance set against the backdrop of a town's difficult history, this story showcases Owens's talent for characterization and her ability to make settings come alive, but her choice to write dialogue in dialect sounds too much like something we've heard before.
