The Fog Machine

A timely and timeless exploration of prejudice and what enables change. Set in the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement—Mississippi Freedom Summer. Told from the perspectives of a 12-year-old white girl, a young black woman who leaves Mississippi for Chicago, and a Freedom Summer volunteer from New York.

Freedom is JOAN BARNES' birthright. As the child of Catholic upper-middle-class Yankees in Baptist-leaning Mississippi, where family roots are as deep as those of the towering loblolly pines, she wants nothing more than to belong. This need repeatedly puts her at odds with what she knows to be right. It will take her years to understand that freedom means choices.

Born to a life of cleaning white folks' houses, C. J. EVANS believes freedom comes from within and can't be given or taken away. And, as her waiting-on-heaven Baptist preacher and white-controlled schools have taught her, freedom takes a back seat to staying safe—whether she's working as a maid in her Jim Crow Mississippi or as a live-in domestic in Chicago, where the rules are far more subtle.
 
His Jewish faith and commitment to tzedakah—justice and righteousness—guide ZACH BERNSTEIN when, as a University of Chicago law student, he heeds the call to join the Mississippi Summer Project. For him, freedom is in the songs the summer volunteers sing to ward off the fear that they, too, will end up like missing rights workers James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.

In the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement—1960s Mississippi—lives collide. Love and heroism ensue as each must question what freedom means and what price they'll pay to have it.

406 pages. 
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The Mississippi Summer Project—since known as Freedom Summer—was a voter registration drive and historic venture into social justice education. Nearly 60 years later, the moment is ripe for the retrospection offered in THE FOG MACHINE. Readers will find familiar history alongside depictions of the less familiar. 

By exploring the age-old problem of prejudice and offering a shared language for talking about civil rights history and race, THE FOG MACHINE is particularly suited to book groups, diversity forums, community reads, high schools, and universities.
 
Ideal for Book Groups

•"THE FOG MACHINE should be read, heard, and shared." Jackie Roberts, Seattle's The BookClub. 

Adult Fiction with Crossover to Young Adult

•"Something different and quite special, with so much to offer YA readers." Shea Peeples, Teen Librarian, Wescott Library, Eagan, MN. 

Powerful Resource for Teachers

•"History told through relationships—the way young adults learn best." Vickie Malone, McComb High social studies teacher.
•"Shines a spotlight on the summer that changed America. Impeccably researched, including details left out of many history books." Debbie Z. Harwell, WEDNESDAYS IN MISSISSIPPI: Proper Ladies Working for Radical Change.
•"This novel clearly did not come about as an accident, but with intent to portray something that literature on the civil rights era often lacks." Håvard Haugland Bamle, PhD Research Fellow, Department of Foreign Languages and Translation, Norway's University of Agder—on teaching THE FOG MACHINE in masters' level "Literature, Culture, and Didactics."