- Mass Market Paperback: 496 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins Canada / General; 1st printing edition (Aug 1 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0380729040
- ISBN-13: 978-0380729043
- Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 10.9 x 3.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 318 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Library Journal
Kay writes novels set in rural Georgia in the postwar years prior to the Civil Rights Movement. A former journalist, the writer (To Dance with the White Dog, Peachtree, 1990) is skilled at blending gritty realism with haunting bits of the supernatural. Tom, the restless 12-year-old son of a sharecropper, is puzzled when the town's citizens seem uncomfortable about his friendship with Son Jesus, an African American boy with whom he has grown up. They run away together, pretending to be Huck Finn and Jim, and a ride through the rapids near a waterfall critically injures Sonny and unites the two as friends for life. After this terrifying episode, Kay's narrative abruptly changes direction: Frank, the soft-spoken town sheriff who learned about tolerance by fighting the Nazis, becomes the central character when he solves a series of racially motivated murders. The dialog is authentic and the storytelling has a homespun Southern texture. A simpler plot and fewer characters might have served the theme better and made the book more appealing to YA readers. For larger and regional collections.?Joyce W. Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Years-old murders spark racial tensions in the rural South in this latest from Kay (Shadow Song, 1994, etc.). In the small town of Crossover, events have generally abided by Logan's Law--the invention of Logan, a former sheriff who spoke of the ``law of the way things are.'' But it's now the late '40s, when the minds of many townspeople have been broadened by their war experiences, and the new sheriff, Frank, is more interested in justice than tradition. Events are set into motion when two 12-year-olds--Son Jesus, mature, mathematically gifted, and black; and Tom, imaginative, prankish, and white--try to run away from home. As they make their way downriver, self-consciously reenacting Huck's and Jim's roles, they stumble upon human bones buried in an old sawmill. The boys are eventually tracked down and returned to their families, but the bones turn out to belong to Son Jesus' father, who's been missing for a few years--one victim of three racially motivated murders committed, according to longstanding rumor, by a masked man known as Pegleg. As Frank investigates, he finds himself becoming enamored of the pretty young widow, Evelyn Carnes, on whose property the father was found and whose deceased husband may have had a role in the deaths. Meanwhile, Frank's dogged inquiries polarize racial sentiments in Crossover, testing the friendship of Tom and Son Jesus as they approach the end of childhood. The situation reaches a crisis when a local bully, Harlan, is accused of raping Son Jesus' sister Remona, and, shortly after, is found dead, an uncle of Son Jesus a prime suspect. Gracefully written, though the disjointed story, borrowing from such tales of childhood and race as To Kill a Mockingbird to Huckleberry Finn, never really gathers the momentum it should. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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First Sentence
His family called him a runaway, and Tom guessed that he was. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
His family called him a runaway, and Tom guessed that he was. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Evokes a difficult time and place,
By
This review is from: The Runaway (Mass Market Paperback)
To really appreciate Terry Kay's "The Runaway" you need to have lived in that time and place -- Georgia, 1949. I did, and I know that Kay has painted it perfectly. I knew those people, remember them well. Before reading the book, I'd read a generally positive review in an Atlanta newspaper, but one that said the book was "overpopulated with stereotypes." What I found was a true portrait of people and place. Like all Southern towns of that period, conformity was enforced at least by social code, if not by law; it would be hard to write a truthful story and not have characters who seem stereotyped. It was a stereotypical period when change required daring, and the soldiers returning from war came home to fill the bill. They'd taken on a sense of purpose: defending human liberty and dignity. Terry Kay tells us that these are the forgotten heroes, the Southern ex-soldiers who stood up and said to their neighbors, straighten up and play right. They faced as much danger, if not more, than when they'd faced the German Nazis, just by saying, "Why don't you leave him alone? What did he do to you?" I said that to three white men one night, when they were picking on a young black man, and I barely escaped with my life. Of course, that was in 1963, and it was a far more dangerous thing to do in 1949, Kay's scenario in The Runaway. It was men like Sheriff Frank Rucker who led the way, who showed us how to speak up for another man's dignity, even when it wasn't safe. Kay's people may be fictional, but they had counterparts in real life. Stereotypes? Hardly.Of course, Terry Kay's writing is moving, nearly ethereal in places, as usual. I was also impressed with how many phrases he was able to use from the dialect of the time: "naked as a jaybird," "a fart in a windstorm." He's a master. So we can forgive him the line on page 381: "Getting out of his car, Hugh walked over to Fuller." Even the greats are allowed one of those now and then.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terry Kay's bag of tricks,
By A Customer
This review is from: Runaway (Paperback)
Terry Kay has had a successful career as a purveyor of popular "Southern" fiction. But those of you who love his novels, please, there are better writers out there. Try some of them. Lee Smith, Fred Chappell, Charles Frazier, Doris Betts....and so on. The author of this book uses his self-described "bag of tricks" to manipulate the reader. Go elsewhere for your reading pleasure.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very fine story with repercussions for the future...,
By "adjuge" (ANTIBES, Alpes-Maritimes France) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Runaway (Paperback)
50 years after the period during which they are portrayed to have occurred, Terry Kay has produced a wholly entertaining novel concerning the lives and times of peoples in the "deep South", those who had participated in WWII and how this apparently affected the way they considered their black neighbours afterwards.I would have considered "The Runaway" to be just like countless other novels, a way of excusing past acts which today would be considered inexcusable and reprehensible. Except that it started my mind wondering about what people today still have problems getting to terms with. Tolerance, or the lack of, still affects the way most people consider their fellows. Today, the differences tend to be mainly represented by religious beliefs or sexual preferences. We haven't yet learned to "Live And Let Live" as far as this is possible. So if you read "The Runaway" which I whole-heartedly recommend, just spare a thought for all those others whose lives may be unbearable today because of "intolerance".
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