Those We Thought We Knew
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4.3 • 13 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2023 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction
Winner of the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award
Winner of the 2024 Sir Walter Raleigh Award
One of Vanity Fair’s Favorite Books of 2023
“A beautifully fearless contemplation.” –S. A. Cosby
From award-winning writer David Joy comes a searing new novel about the cracks that form in a small North Carolina community and the evils that unfurl from its center.
Toya Gardner, a young Black artist from Atlanta, has returned to her ancestral home in the North Carolina mountains to trace her family history and complete her graduate thesis. But when she encounters a still-standing Confederate monument in the heart of town, she sets her sights on something bigger.
Meanwhile, local deputies find a man sleeping in the back of a station wagon and believe him to be nothing more than some slack-jawed drifter. Yet a search of the man’s vehicle reveals that he is a high-ranking member of the Klan, and the uncovering of a notebook filled with local names threatens to turn the mountain on end.
After two horrific crimes split the county apart, every soul must wrestle with deep and unspoken secrets that stretch back for generations. Those We Thought We Knew is an urgent unraveling of the dark underbelly of a community. Richly drawn and bracingly honest, it asks what happens when the people you’ve always known turn out to be monsters, what do you do when everything you ever believed crumbles away?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Joy (When These Mountains Burn) combines in this earnest if flawed outing a meditation on racism in rural North Carolina with the story of an investigation into a young woman's killing. In the summer of 2019, 24-year-old Black artist Toya Gardner travels from Atlanta to visit her grandmother, Vess Jones, in Jackson County, N.C. There, she's outraged to find a Confederate monument still standing outside the library and defaces it. She's arrested by Sheriff John Coggins, a lifelong friend of Vess's who would've preferred not to take Toya into custody. Meanwhile, local Klansman William Dean Cawthorn receives a dressing-down from a superior for staging public actions rather than pursuing the KKK's agenda from behind the scenes. Defiant, Cawthorn and other white supremacists instigate a riot at the statue, where anti-racist protesters including Toya have already gathered. Toya is found dead after the melee, and Coggins's deputy is badly beaten by a gang of Klansmen while on a fishing trip. The story then shifts to police procedural, with Det. Leah Green working her first homicide case and puzzling out if the attacks on Toya and the deputy were connected. Though some of the dialogue feels a bit didactic (including a scene in which Vess patiently explains to John the ways in which racism still exists), Joy manages to get the reader invested in his characters and conveys a clear sense of small-town life. Still, it's not quite enough to sustain the contrived story.
