Your Blues Ain't Like Mine

by Bebe Moore Campbell

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Chicago-born Amrstrong Todd is fifteen, black, and unused to the ways of the segregated Deep South, when his mother sends him to spend the summer with relatives in rural Mississippi. For speaking a few innocuous words in French to a white woman, Armstrong is killed. And the precariously balanced world and its determined people - white and black - are changed, then and forever, by the horror of poverty, the legacy of justice, and the singular gift of love's power to heal.

Reviews

"Intriguing...A thoughtful, intelligent work...The novel traces the years from the '50s to the late '80s, from Eisenhower to George Bush....She writes with simple eloquence about small-town life in the South, right after the start of the great social upheaval of the civil rights movement....Campbell has a strong creative voice." -The Washington Post Book World"Much of the power of this novel results from Ms. Campbell's subtle and seamless shifting of point of view. She wears the skin and holds in her chest the heart of each of her characters..". - New York Times Book Review.

"Written in poetic prose, filled with masterfully drawn and sympathetic characters that a less able hand might have rendered in stereotypes, this first novel blends the irony of Flannery O'Connor's fiction and the poignance of Harper Lee's." - Publishers Weekly

"A powerful first novel." - Time