Synopses & Reviews
Prince Edward is the profound story of Benjamin Rome, a ten-year-old boy living through the summer and fall of 1959 in Prince Edward County, Virginia. The stage for the massive resistance of local whites against nationwide desegregation, the county is a frightening and passionate place of shifting loyalties and ardent belief. It is here that Ben must learn to navigate not only his adolescence, but the politics of the time through his powerful family. A brilliant melding of historical record and personal experience, Dennis McFarlands fifth novel is an affirmation of his devastating emotional insight and graceful narrative gifts.
Dennis McFarland is the bestselling author of Singing Boy, The Music Room, School for the Blind, and A Face at the Window. His fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and The New Yorker. He lives with his family in Massachusetts. A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Top 10 Book of the Year
In August of 1959, Benjamin Rome is ten years old, and his hometown of Farmville, Virginia, is immersed in a frenzy of activity the likes of which Ben has seen only at revival meetings. The Supreme Court has ordered the state to desegregate its public schools; in response, Prince Edward County has instead voted to close them. Only a few weeks remain in which to establish a private, white-only system. Most of Ben's family is involved in the effort: His grandfather, Daddy Cary, has the ringleaders making speeches at his sixty-fifth birthday party; his father and his older brother, Al, "borrow" Farmville High's lights for the new football field; his mother volunteers at the library book drive. Only Ben's sister, Lainie, stands back, troubled but caught up in problems of her own.
Come September, Prince Edward's Negro children will have no schools to attend, and that include Burghardt, the son of the hired hand who works on Daddy Cary's farm. Ben and Burghardt have been doing chores together, swimming in the creek at the end of the road, and sharing observations about the adult world for as long as Ben can remember. Ben has always known that the lives of Negroes and white are separated by a "color line," but lately none of what he has known seems to make sense. Burghardt's grandmother, Granny Mays, steals away into the woods to testify to the trees about the suffering of her people; Burghardt appears to be hiding silver dollars in the rafters of the henhouse. Lainie takes Ben on a mysterious mission to the middle of nowhere; Al, up to now a petty thief, may have committed an unforgivable crime; and, meanwhile, the county's white leaders forge ahead with their plans to close the schools. When the summer's events lead to an explosive climax, Ben, under the pressure of divided loyalties, finds himself facing choices beyond his years. It will be a long time before he begins to understand all he learns that summerone of the hottest on record, and, for him, the longest and most important.
In this, his fifth and finest book, Dennis McFarland masterfully blends fiction and history to an emotionally powerful effect. Prince Edward renders, with McFarland's customary compassion and art, a shameful chapter in our nation's history, seen through the eyes of a sensitive, observant young boy. "The year is 1959, the locale is rural Virginia, and McFarland, whose prose is richly and beautifully detailed, burnishes every facet of that long-gone time and place to a virtually flawless verisimilitude, down to 'the burnt plastic odor of [a] flashbulb.'"Madison Smartt Bell, The Washington Post Book World "The year is 1959, the locale is rural Virginia, and McFarland, whose prose is richly and beautifully detailed, burnishes every facet of that long-gone time and place to a virtually flawless verisimilitude, down to 'the burnt plastic odor of [a] flashbulb.'"Madison Smartt Bell, The Washington Post Book World "Deeply affecting . . . [This is] a novel that provides as much fresh insight into the social history of America as it does into the nature of adolescence, drawing us back with a degree of fascination and horror to the nation's past and our own . . . McFarland is a genius with the tragic-comedy of adolescent confusion in the face of adults' hypocrisy."Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor "A relief and a boon to those of us still invigorated by an old-fashioned yarn. Devoid of weak metaphors, extraneous adverbs, and the fey posing of much contemporary fiction, [McFarland's] style is easy and smooth, the descriptions etched in simple language and all the more powerful because of it."Jay Atkinson, The Boston Globe "Through his deeply memorable characters . . . [McFarland] shows how social malignancies mutate from one generation to the next . . . Masterfully conveys the confluence of public and private life . . . I cant name a single fictional technique that McFarland does not handle in as agile a manner as possible."The Courier-Journal (Louisville) "Graceful and empathetic, Prince Edward eloquently encapsulates how much was at stake and which set of values deserved to overcome."The Miami Herald "McFarland allows us to go beyond just remembering this part of our past. Rather . . . he enables us to experience it through the sensibilities of the characters who ‘lived it . . . The experience is a memorable one."Richmond Times-Dispatch "McFarland has always been a psychologically astute writer, adept at the intimate gesture, the anatomy of family tensions, the investigation of small mysteries that bespeak large secrets. What better way to lay bare the cruelties and indignities of pre-civil rights Virginia than to show them to us through the eyes of a young boy who must struggle to understand what he is seeing, and as best he can, rise above its tormenting inequities."Rosellen Brown, The New Leader "[This novel is] affecting [and] based on fact: the defiance of a 1959 Supreme Court order to integrate public schools, by Virginia's Prince Edward County, whose white residents conspired to build a (private) 'Foundation School' that would exclude black children. Our narrator, ten-year-old Ben Rome, observes this process and events related to it with mingled excitement, fear, and guilt. He's concerned for his black friend Burghardt, son of the Romes' 'tenant' Julius, who shares Ben's chores on the Rome egg farm. Ben labors to understand his father's ingrained racism, his mother's emotional instability, the resentments nurtured by his adult brother Al and married (and pregnant) sister Lainieand also the nature of the threat posed by his prosperous grandfather Daddy Cary, 'an enormous bullying man' whose teasing of both Ben and Burghardt takes uncomfortably intimate form. Ben's habit of 'spying' on inexplicable adult behavior leads him to empathize with Burghardt's elderly Granny Mays, whose commitment to educate herself and her own arouses her neighbors' antipathyand to eavesdrop on the violent scene that effectively ends Daddy Cary's reign of terror . . . Prince Edward is earnest and compassionate, told in a hushed lyrical voice that's often reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird; Ben is also an appealing protagonist indeed, and several of the other characters here are quite credibly complex . . . Well wo
Review
“Deeply affecting...a novel that provides as much fresh insight into the social history of America as it does into the nature of adolescence." --
The Christian Science Monitor"A relief and a boon to those of us still invigorated by an old-fashioned yarn. Devoid of weak metaphors, extraneous adverbs, and the fey posing of much contemporary fiction, [McFarlands] style is easy and smooth, the descriptions etched in simple language and all the more powerful because of it." --The Boston Sunday Globe
"The year is 1959...and McFarland, whose prose is richly and beautifully detailed, burnishes every facet of that long- gone time and places to a virtually flawless verisimilitude." --The Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
Prince Edward is the profound story of Benjamin Rome, a ten-year-old boy living through the summer and fall of 1959 in Prince Edward County, Virginia. The stage for the massive resistance of local whites against nationwide desegregation, the county is a frightening and passionate place of shifting loyalties and ardent belief. It is here that Ben must learn to navigate not only his adolescence, but the politics of the time through his powerful family. A brilliant melding of historical record and personal experience, Dennis McFarlands fifth novel is an affirmation of his devastating emotional insight and graceful narrative gifts.
About the Author
Dennis McFarland is the author of five novels, including Si
nging Boy and
The Music Room. He lives with his family in Boston, Massachusetts.