Girl Gone North by John McIlveen

Review Posted Online: July 21, 2023 — My Rating: 5 Stars

This review was posted to Goodreads and The StoryGraph.

If you want facts, read a reputable newspaper.

If you want to understand human nature, read a novel.

If you want powerful fiction, read John McIlveen.

Mac’s writing can be so intense that you will need to put the book down and, quite literally, walk away to process what you have just read. I came to such a point in the story where I had to put the book down and just walk away. I didn’t pick the book up again until several hours later. The passages were so disturbingly real, and I was so caught up in the moment, I could not continue.

I had the privilege of reading the manuscript of GIRL GONE NORTH in 2016. That’s right, seven years ago. It was the best book I read that year. In 2019, it was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize for the Best Unpublished Manuscript award.

In GIRL GONE NORTH you will meet Emma Holden… smart but insecure as too many young women are, and Black. And, Thalia Holden, Emma’s younger sister… also smart, loves baseball, and not as insecure. These sisters grew up in a loving home in the Ninth Ward, New Orleans. Their wealth is measured in the love of family, the value of community, not in material things. Then everything ‘went south.’

GIRL GONE NORTH is set in 1961, a time of great racial turbulence in both the southern and northern states. The early sixties marked a time of revolutionary change in a country that still did not accept the basic premise that “all men are created equal…” and women were even less equal.  This is a novel that looks at issues of race from all sides although it is centered around the Black experience of the times. It is a book that, with few changes, could be written about any time in American history. The divide has existed since the time of the first explorers right up to the twenty-first century. Since the 2016 manuscript, it has been updated to add the last few years into the history.

If you plan to read only one book this year, make it this one! And a word to the wise — there aren’t enough tissues in the box…