Is it possible for a mother to love her child too much?This is the question that haunts Kathryne Smallwood the night before her son, Early, faces sentencing for killing another teenager.

Kathryne has devoted her life to her only child. She has made herself present in his every activity, every decision, every move, in hopes of protecting him. But it may just be this powerful force that sends her son spiraling in the opposite direction.

Critically acclaimed author Judy Goldman tells a riveting, deeply moving story of a well-to-do southern family whose smooth, easy lives are suddenly disrupted irreversibly. As Kathryne Smallwood waits for morning and her son's fate, she searches her memory for details of his life and her own to discover where she went wrong, how she could have stopped the unspeakable act her eighteen-year-old son has committed. All she ever wanted was to keep him safe and happy. Isn't that what every mother wants? Kathryne realizes, too late, that the hardest part of parenting might be knowing when to hold back. Now she must come to terms with Early's leaving and what to do when her one reason for living is gone.

Goldman presents a wise, sharp-eyed invitation to explore the nature of family and, in particular, the nature of marriage and parenting — how we think we're doing the right thing when what we're really doing is following our own hungers.

"A mother goes to great lengths to defend her son in this slow-going, sentimental domestic tale with a racial spin. On the same night white student Early Smallwood delivers his high school's commencement address, he shoots and kills a young black man in Charlotte, N.C., in 1987. His mother, first-person narrator Kathryne Smallwood, a movie critic for a local magazine and wife to a successful lawyer, Peter, proceeds to recount in exhaustive detail Early's development from adored, overindulged only child and model pupil to accomplice to his delinquent childhood friend, Chip. Despite Kathryne's anguished self-searching, however, there's no convincing explanation for the valedictorian's transformation into a murderer save that Early was in the wrong place in bad company. Poet and novelist Goldman (The Slow Way Back) strives to engage with complex racial questions, but her protagonist's moral struggles are one-dimensional and dated as she struggles to reconcile her liberal self-image with her son's act. At novel's end, the Smallwoods remain bewildered by the changes around them, with Kathryne still wondering how she ended up 'on the wrong side of a race issue.' All too convincing as a study in self-delusion, this is too deliberate and uninflected to satisfy as fiction." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

From the critically acclaimed author of "The Slow Way Back" comes this piercingly honest, stunning portrait of a mother whose overwhelming love has dark repercussions for her only child.

Judy Goldman's first novel, The Slow Way Back, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Fiction Award and the Mary Ruffin Poole First Work of Fiction Award, and was a finalist for the Southeast Booksellers Association's Best Novel of the Year. She is also the author of two books of poetry. Her work has been published widely in literary journals, and her commentaries have aired on public radio. She and her husband live in Charlotte, North Carolina. They have two married children and twin granddaughters.