Yankee Girl
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- ¥1,400
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- ¥1,400
発行者による作品情報
An unflinching story about racism and culture clash in the 1960s.
The year is 1964, and Alice Ann Moxley's FBI-agent father has been reassigned from Chicago to Jackson, Mississippi, to protect black people who are registering to vote. Alice finds herself thrust into the midst of the racial turmoil that dominates current events, especially when a Negro girl named Valerie Taylor joins her sixth-grade class -- the first of two black students at her new school because of a mandatory integration law.
When Alice finds it difficult to penetrate the clique of girls at school she calls the Cheerleaders (they call her Yankee Girl), she figures Valerie, being the other outsider, will be easier to make friends with. But Valerie isn't looking for friends. Rather, Valerie silently endures harassment from the Cheerleaders, much worse than what Alice is put through. Soon Alice realizes the only way to befriend the girls is to seem like a co-conspirator in their plans to make Valerie miserable.
It takes a horrible tragedy for her to realize the complete ramifications of following the crowd instead of her heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this impressive debut novel set in 1964, Rodman infuses the familiar struggle of the new girl in town with immediacy, danger and historical relevance. Alice Ann Moxley, daughter of an FBI agent, moves from Chicago to Mississippi right before sixth grade begins and just as her new school receives its first "colored" students. As she takes in the local customs (seventh graders wear lipstick, the ladies all have maids because "nigras work for nothing"), Alice yearns to fit in with the popular and powerful cheerleading crowd, but they ignore her except to brand her Yankee Girl. She briefly and unsuccessfully attempts to befriend the lone black student, Valerie Jackson, who braves the initial crowds of jeering adults and seemingly ignores the cheerleaders' constant taunts and increasingly nasty pranks. The girl bullying theme may be universal, but what makes this novel stand out are the compelling threads in Alice's outsider's insights on the Southern milieu, her friendship with the boy next door, the institutionalized racism (a glamorous teacher disinfects her desk after Valerie touches it; a shop clerk won't allow a black customer to try on a dress), and Alice's fears as the KKK stakes out their house. Despite one or two unnecessarily neat plot twists, Rodman shows characters grappling with hard choices, sometimes courageously, sometimes willfully, sometimes inconsistently, but invariably believably. Whether or not readers are familiar with civil rights, they are likely to find this novel memorable because it so strikingly identifies the bravery, cruelty and vulnerability of characters their own age. Ages 10-up.
