Those We Thought We Knew

March 1, 2023

A young Black artist returns to her North Carolina mountain home to trace her family history but instead turns her attention to the Confederate statue still standing in town. Meanwhile, the local deputies discover a drifter who turns out to be a high-up Klan member, and two violent crimes follow. From Dashiell Hammett Award winner Joy, though note that this is also BISACed as literary fiction. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2023
A pair of violent attacks reveal the racist history of a North Carolina town. Joy's new novel opens with a foreboding sentence: "The graves took all night to dig." The graves in this case are part of an art project headed by a young Black woman named Toya Gardner, who is engaged in a series of works that revisit the town's history of racism and intolerance. (Of a local college's early-20th-century expansion, she says, "They bulldozed a Cherokee mound and razed a Black church. Those are the things that school chose to move.") Nearby, Ernie Allison, a White sheriff's deputy, finds William Dean Cawthorn, a man with a swastika tattoo, sleeping in the back of a car along with Klan robes, a gun, and a list of contacts that includes the local chief of police, the last of which soon goes missing. Tension builds and builds to two acts of violence directed at Toya and Ernie. In the aftermath, the aging Sheriff John Coggins and Toya's grandmother Vess Jones move to the forefront of the novel, as does Leah Green, the detective handling the investigation. Joy emphasizes the setting here, immersing the reader in quotidian details and embracing the plot's slow burn. It's telling that snakes in a house are a recurring image--and much of the book centers around its White characters grappling with their culpability in racism both overt and passive. Or, as the head of a local church tells Green, "It shouldn't take a Black life for you to have some moment of insight, some moment of clarity." And the mystery at the novel's heart plays out in an unexpected way, with Joy employing a deft touch to the plotting. An emotionally complex procedural that goes to unexpected places.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 3, 2023
Joy (When These Mountains Burn) combines in this earnest if flawed outing a meditation on racism in rural North Carolina with the story of an investigation into a young woman’s killing. In the summer of 2019, 24-year-old Black artist Toya Gardner travels from Atlanta to visit her grandmother, Vess Jones, in Jackson County, N.C. There, she’s outraged to find a Confederate monument still standing outside the library and defaces it. She’s arrested by Sheriff John Coggins, a lifelong friend of Vess’s who would’ve preferred not to take Toya into custody. Meanwhile, local Klansman William Dean Cawthorn receives a dressing-down from a superior for staging public actions rather than pursuing the KKK’s agenda from behind the scenes. Defiant, Cawthorn and other white supremacists instigate a riot at the statue, where anti-racist protesters including Toya have already gathered. Toya is found dead after the melee, and Coggins’s deputy is badly beaten by a gang of Klansmen while on a fishing trip. The story then shifts to police procedural, with Det. Leah Green working her first homicide case and puzzling out if the attacks on Toya and the deputy were connected. Though some of the dialogue feels a bit didactic (including a scene in which Vess patiently explains to John the ways in which racism still exists), Joy manages to get the reader invested in his characters and conveys a clear sense of small-town life. Still, it’s not quite enough to sustain the contrived story. Agent: Julia Kenny, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary.

August 1, 2023
Joy's salient novel excavates generational divides in a small community in rural North Carolina. Toya Gardner travels from Atlanta to her mother's family home in the mountain town of Sylva. There, living with her grandmother Vess, she bears witness to inequities both flagrant--a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier in the middle of town--and buried over time--an entire church forced to move due to racist violence. For Toya, a student artist working to shine light on every name forgotten and every crime left to fade, these cover-ups become too much to bear, and her thesis project threatens to rip the town's facile peace to shreds. Simultaneously, Sheriff John Coggins learns from his young deputy that a man from Mississippi was found drunk in his car with a white robe and hood in his trunk and a binder full of the town's most prominent names in the front seat. Through rich character introspection and acidic dialogue, Joy (When These Mountains Burn, 2020) masterfully encapsulates the larger conversation about America's hidden past occurring in the real world in real time.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2023

One night in 2019 in a North Carolina town, Deputy Ernie Allison arrests a Mississippi man whose car contains a gun, a white hood, and a notebook listing the names of prominent townspeople. When Ernie returns to the car later to retrieve the notebook, it's gone. Meanwhile, Toya Gardner--art student, activist, and granddaughter of Vess Jones, a longtime Black resident--is in town for the summer, staying with her grandmother and researching her thesis at the local university, research that leads her to discover aspects of the town's racial history that most residents willingly forget. After she paints the hands of a statue of a Confederate soldier red in protest, tensions flare. Following a rally, Toya is found murdered, and Detective Leah Green investigates, even as Sheriff Coggins investigates Ernie's brutal beating by people in Klan robes. What they discover will throw the town's grimmest secrets into high relief. VERDICT While the novel has several major characters, the fulcrum of the story is Det. Green, whose investigation forces her to confront the history and attitudes she has always conveniently ignored. The result is a powerful novel that pushes beyond Joy's (When These Mountains Burn) rural noir to confront timely issues.--Lawrence Rungren

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.