Poet and playwright Jackson traverses the freshman year of protagonist Magdalena Grace, revealing the indignities that Maggie and her friends and family endure during the civil rights era. The loosely plotted narrative follows 17-year-old Maggie to Eden University in September 1967, where she is one of a few African-Americans on campus along with roommates Essie Witherspoon and Leona Pryor. Jackson portrays their youthful uncertainties, their desire to fight discrimination and their hesitancy about the future. In a series of vignettes, Maggie dips into black high culture, is a shaken observer to sudden violence, faces overt racism, is beset with family problems, learns the power of sexual attraction and, eventually, helps her friends mount a potentially dangerous protest. Overwritten and suffering from too large a cast of characters, the dazzling turns of phrase do not make up for a lack of cohesiveness. Admirers of Jackson will enjoy the poems that are sprinkled throughout the novel, but its sheer talkiness is a disappointment. (Sept.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

"What I be sayin is myths and fables and lies; rumors of war and physical pain and pestilence; humor and wisdom and loveliness. My imagination and seven madnesses." In her first novel, Jackson justifies why she received both the Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award and the Carl Sandberg Award for Poetry. As her protagonist, Magdalena Grace, navigates interracial Eden University during the civil rights movement, Jackson weaves an intricate tale of discovery. Her characters do not simply move the story, they are the story: "Miss Rose took the sniffle for a sniff of superiority or contempt. She sat up in the kitchen chair and talked all hot and huffy to Mama." Verdict Like Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, this work wonderfully fuses narration, historical significances, and poetry that lovers of literary fiction will thoroughly appreciate.-Ashanti White, Univ. of North Carolina at Greensboro, Raleigh, NC Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

*Starred Review* Justifiably proud of her admission to elite Eden University, but apprehensive about the myriad ways her working-class family will embarrass her or tug on loyalties of race and class, Magdalena Grace sets off for her freshman year. It is 1968, and she and her two roommates are part of a contingent of black students newly enrolled at the midwestern university, all struggling with the same divided loyalties. They cling to each other in solidarity as racial tensions escalate, traveling to the nearby big city for cultural fortification. But Magdalena finds that her connections to the city, as well as her families' deeper roots in the South, are challenged by generational and geographical differences. On campus, she navigates shifting politics among an array of students and faculty, whites and blacks. A campus protest by black students and the assassination of Martin Luther King and the ensuing riots help crystallize her emotions. Through lyrical writing and finely drawn characters, acclaimed poet Jackson captures the pain and joy of self-discovery in late adolescence, as well as struggles of race and class identity, against the backdrop of racial tensions on a college campus in the 1960s.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2009 Booklist From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.