FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
Karen Chilton’s performance of this debut novel is what happens when an outstanding narrator finds their perfect match in a text. In 1957, Alice Young flees her home in rural Alabama and lands in New Jessup, an all-Black town that has spent generations carving out a place for itself as a safe haven for Black families. There, Alice falls for Raymond Campbell, a man whose organizing efforts are beginning to make waves in a way that Alice questions. Through every twist and turn of this novel, Chilton’s performance provides an intimate understanding of its characters. Her narration captures the emotional turmoil of a young woman who is fighting to keep her newfound home safe for the next generation. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
Finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize 2023 Southern Literary Review Book of the Year Winner of the 2024 BCALA First Novelist Award Named a Best/Most Recommended Book of January/2022 by the Chicago Review of Books and The Rumpus "My favorite novels light up my brain with things I hadn’t considered before – and this one does exactly that. The deep complexity of the American Civil Rights movement; the various, sometimes opposing approaches of its leaders to desegregation; the gains and inevitable casualties that social progress can claim. With compelling characters and a heart-pounding plot, Jamila Minnicks pulled me into pages of history I’d never turned before." —Barbara Kingsolver “I was awestruck by its beauty, rapt by its originality, and astounded by its depth. But what astonished me most was learning that this is a debut. The craftwork is extraordinary. Was this book dreamed into existence? Did the Ancestors themselves place this story in the writer’s mind? From page one, I knew this work would transform me. It expanded the way I imagine what is possible in the art form. More than interesting, it is integral. More than important, it is inspiring. Read this book. Cherish it. Protect it. You must. Right out of the gate, Jamila Minnicks’s Moonrise Over New Jessup is a masterpiece.” —Robert Jones, Jr., author of The New York Times bestselling novel, The Prophets "An immersive and timely recasting of history by a gloriously talented writer to watch. You will fall in love with New Jessup: the town and the book." —Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of The Revisioners "Elegant and nuanced, Moonrise Over New Jessup is an incandescent work of art through-and-through, from a powerful new voice."—Jason Mott, author of National Book Award winner Hell of a Book “Moonrise over New Jessup is a tender and beautifully written debut that shines light on the untold stories of the women who supported the foot soldiers of the bourgeoning civil rights movement. Warm and affecting, this book will draw you in with its heart.”—Heidi W. Durrow, author of the New York Times bestseller The Girl Who Fell from the Sky “No one who's read Zora Neale Hurston ever forgets her Eatonville. So too will Jamila Minnicks’s New Jessup live on in the American imagination as both a place and an idea. Moonrise Over New Jessup is a staggeringly beautiful love letter to Blackness — particularly southern Blackness — that celebrates the joys, sadness, and multiplicity of existence outside the white gaze. An absolute triumph, Moonrise Over New Jessup confirms a major voice in Jamila Minnicks, a writer everyone should be watching.”—Dionne Irving, author of The Islands
Library Journal
★ 01/01/2023
DEBUT In this 2021 winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, getting off a Birmingham-bound bus in the town of New Jessup entirely changes the life of Alice, our heroine and narrator. The year is 1957, and Alice is amazed that this small town in Alabama has no signage for "coloreds only" at water fountains and restrooms. This community has only Black residents and is a well-organized, well-run, prosperous place. There Alice meets and falls in love with Raymond Campbell, the grandson of one of New Jessup's founders and the owner of a successful automotive repair and towing business. Raymond secretly belongs to the National Negro Advancement Society, an organization striving to keep the races segregated and allow Black Alabamians to flourish without the aid of white people. Alice eventually learns that Raymond's local group aims to make New Jessup a recognized municipality, and like the national group, they do not favor racial integration but separation and self-governance. VERDICT An outstanding writer, Minnicks excels at capturing the atmosphere and issues of a specific locale at a particular time, the Deep South at the dawn of the civil rights era. This highly recommended title is an excellent choice for book discussion groups and would make a great movie.—Lisa Rohrbaugh
FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
Karen Chilton’s performance of this debut novel is what happens when an outstanding narrator finds their perfect match in a text. In 1957, Alice Young flees her home in rural Alabama and lands in New Jessup, an all-Black town that has spent generations carving out a place for itself as a safe haven for Black families. There, Alice falls for Raymond Campbell, a man whose organizing efforts are beginning to make waves in a way that Alice questions. Through every twist and turn of this novel, Chilton’s performance provides an intimate understanding of its characters. Her narration captures the emotional turmoil of a young woman who is fighting to keep her newfound home safe for the next generation. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2022-10-12
A Southern community confronts the meaning of Black power.
In a warmly appealing book debut, Minnicks, winner of the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, considers the fraught question of integration from the perspective of an all-Black community in rural Alabama. It’s 1957, and Alice Young is on her way to Birmingham after fleeing abuse in the segregated town where she grew up. Getting off the bus to stretch her legs, she is incredulous to find herself in a place with no “WHITES ONLY signs and backdoor Negro entrances.” New Jessup, she learns, had been established by freedmen who separated from the White community “across the woods,” where they had worked “from field to house and everywhere inside.” Even after Whites tried to run the Black people of New Jessup off the land, they rebuilt and set down roots, started thriving businesses, a school, a hospital, and farms. But, Alice soon discovers, there are troubles: A growing national movement for desegregation has incited dissension. Some in New Jessup agree with the NAACP that integration will be favorable for Blacks; others, that “independence, and not mixing” is a better goal. In New Jessup, the independence movement is adopted by the National Negro Advancement Society, whose aim is “keeping folks from across the woods outta our hair and our pockets for good!” Alice would prefer to distance herself from politics, but she becomes immersed in the controversy when she falls in love with an NNAS activist. How, the NNAS asks, can separation work for Negro communities? Will integration mean equal rights—or merely upending lives for something neither Blacks nor Whites want? What is a viable path to real power? Minnicks’ impassioned characters struggle with those questions as they think about the consequences of court-mandated integration and the reality of living in a society where, Alice realizes, “not all unwelcoming is posted in the window at eye level.”
A thoughtful look at a complex issue.
