| Vendor | |
|---|---|
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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
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| Weblink | |
| www.deborahjohnsonbooks.com/inde … | |
THE SECRET OF MAGIC
Part history, part mystery, THE SECRET OF MAGIC examines our complicated relationship with race, and the power of stories and those who tell them.
In 1946, Regina Robichard is a young lawyer, the first woman hired by Thurgood Marshall at the nascent NAACP Legal Defense Fund working in his Manhattan office. While sorting through the fund’s countless letters asking for help, Regina comes across a letter from M.P. Calhoun, one of the most famous yet reclusive authors of the century. In the letter, Calhoun asks Marshall to investigate the murder of Joe Howard Wilson, a decorated black lieutenant who had been on his way back to his small Mississippi town of Revere, worn and weary from World War II combat. Joe Howard had called his father from the Alabama border, telling him he would arrive in two hours’ time. But Joe Howard never arrived in Revere—and two weeks later his murdered body was found.
M.P. Calhoun’s book, The Secret of Magic, a powerful combination of To Kill a Mockingbird and Peter Pan, featured white and black children playing together in a magical forest. It was banned more than any other book in the South. It appeared on the cover of Time magazine. It was a sensation and was adored by Regina. And then M.P. Calhoun disappeared. Despite his better judgment, Marshall gives Regina permission to investigate the case. Once she arrives in Mississippi, her search brings her face-to-face not with the kindly author of her childhood dreams, but rather with Mary Pickett Calhoun, a grand southern dame holding onto the last vestiges of her family’s heritage.
Nothing in Revere is as it seems. Regina must navigate the muddy waters of racism, relationships, and her own tragic past. Most of all, she must make an attempt at the impossible: to attain justice for a black man in the Deep South.
Deborah Johnson grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and attended Lone Mountain College, which now forms part of the University of San Francisco. She spent 18 years in Rome, where she worked as a translator and as an editor of English-language doctoral theses for students at the Gregorian and Angelicum Pontifical Universities. She also worked at Vatican Radio in its Africa-Anglophone department. After returning to the United States, she became executive director of a small, private charitable foundation in the South. Her first novel, The Air Between Us, was published by HarperCollins/Amistad in 2010 and was the recipient of the Mississippi Library Association Award for Fiction (an award Kathryn Stockett also won, for The Help). She now lives and writes in Columbus, Mississippi.
M.P. Calhoun’s book, The Secret of Magic, a powerful combination of To Kill a Mockingbird and Peter Pan, featured white and black children playing together in a magical forest. It was banned more than any other book in the South. It appeared on the cover of Time magazine. It was a sensation and was adored by Regina. And then M.P. Calhoun disappeared. Despite his better judgment, Marshall gives Regina permission to investigate the case. Once she arrives in Mississippi, her search brings her face-to-face not with the kindly author of her childhood dreams, but rather with Mary Pickett Calhoun, a grand southern dame holding onto the last vestiges of her family’s heritage.
Nothing in Revere is as it seems. Regina must navigate the muddy waters of racism, relationships, and her own tragic past. Most of all, she must make an attempt at the impossible: to attain justice for a black man in the Deep South.
Deborah Johnson grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and attended Lone Mountain College, which now forms part of the University of San Francisco. She spent 18 years in Rome, where she worked as a translator and as an editor of English-language doctoral theses for students at the Gregorian and Angelicum Pontifical Universities. She also worked at Vatican Radio in its Africa-Anglophone department. After returning to the United States, she became executive director of a small, private charitable foundation in the South. Her first novel, The Air Between Us, was published by HarperCollins/Amistad in 2010 and was the recipient of the Mississippi Library Association Award for Fiction (an award Kathryn Stockett also won, for The Help). She now lives and writes in Columbus, Mississippi.
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Book
Published 2014-01-20 by Amy Einhorn |
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Book
Published 2014-01-20 by Amy Einhorn |