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The Twelve-Mile Straight: A Novel
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Published:
HarperAudio 2017
Status:
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Description

From New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Henderson, an audacious American epic set in rural Georgia during the years of the Depression and Prohibition.

Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: in a house full of secrets, two babies—one light-skinned, the other dark—are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.

Despite the prying eyes and curious whispers of the townspeople, Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. But soon it becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together are more intricate than any could have ever imagined. As startling revelations mount, a web of lies begins to collapse around the family, destabilizing their precarious world and forcing all to reckon with the painful truth.

Acclaimed author Eleanor Henderson has returned with a novel that combines the intimacy of a family drama with the staggering presence of a great Southern saga. Tackling themes of racialized violence, social division, and financial crisis, The Twelve-Mile Straight is a startlingly timely, emotionally resonant, and magnificent tour de force.

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Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
09/12/2017
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780062694874
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Eleanor Henderson. (2017). The Twelve-Mile Straight: A Novel. Unabridged HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Eleanor Henderson. 2017. The Twelve-Mile Straight: A Novel. HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Eleanor Henderson, The Twelve-Mile Straight: A Novel. HarperAudio, 2017.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Eleanor Henderson. The Twelve-Mile Straight: A Novel. Unabridged HarperAudio, 2017.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 17:24:01
Date Updated:
Oct 31, 2022 22:39:03
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Mar 24, 2024 08:47:43
Last Metadata Change:
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        Eleanor Henderson was born in Greece, grew up in Florida, and attended Middlebury College and the University of Virginia. Her debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints, was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by the New York Times and a finalist for the Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times and was adapted into a film in 2015. An associate professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two sons.

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The Twelve-Mile Straight
fullDescription

From New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Henderson, an audacious American epic set in rural Georgia during the years of the Depression and Prohibition.

Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: in a house full of secrets, two babies—one light-skinned, the other dark—are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.

Despite the prying eyes and curious whispers of the townspeople, Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. But soon it becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together are more intricate than any could have ever imagined. As startling revelations mount, a web of lies begins to collapse around the family, destabilizing their precarious world and forcing all to reckon with the painful truth.

Acclaimed author Eleanor Henderson has returned with a novel that combines the intimacy of a family drama with the staggering presence of a great Southern saga. Tackling themes of racialized violence, social division, and financial crisis, The Twelve-Mile Straight is a startlingly timely, emotionally resonant, and magnificent tour de force.

reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        July 17, 2017
        Lingering in the overheated world of the Deep South during the Depression, the convoluted second novel by Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints) delves into questions of race, class, and gender, sometimes at the expense of character development. When Georgia sharecropper and bootlegger Juke’s teenaged daughter, Elma, claims to have given birth to twins, one white and one black, her father and her wealthy ne’er-do-well fiancé become enraged, and a black field hand is lynched. Elma cares for the children with the help of Nan, a mute young black servant and midwife in whom Juke takes an interest. The babies are treated as a miracle by some in the community and a sin by others, and they attract the attention of both a polio-stricken researcher who studies sickle cell disease at a university in Atlanta and the members of a chain gang who are paving the little back road on which Elma’s family lives. The richly detailed landscape of the volatile mill town where the novel is set immerse the reader in an unsentimental version of the South under economic and social pressure. The plot of the novel is less promising: readers are likely to figure out supposed secrets long before they are revealed.

      • premium: True
      • source: AudioFile Magazine
      • content: Narrator Allyson Johnson weaves a Southern gothic tale that wraps around the listener like a coiling snake. After a body is dragged and dismembered following a lynching, a town's secrets fester through generations. Johnson's delivery infuses the story with verve. She can voice a lisping preacher, a crying drunk, and a righteous teetotaler. She glides over a testy honeymoon and is tender in describing a sisterly relationship. Throughout, she makes class and race divisions palpable. A listener can almost hear the splashes in the baptismal creek, nearly taste the clay some characters eat. Henderson's prose and Johnson's voice make this production a must-listen. M.P.P. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        April 15, 2017

        Henderson, who launched her career with Ten Thousand Saints, both a New York Times best seller and best book, returns with a story set in 1930 Georgia. Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter, has given birth to two babies, one dark-skinned, which leads to the lynching of a field hand for presumed rape. The lies propping up Elma's family eventually start to give way. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

        Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from August 1, 2017

        In 1930 Georgia, retribution is swift when white sharecropper's daughter Elma Jesup gives birth to two babies, one dark-skinned. For the presumed rape, field hand Genus Jackson is dragged to his death down a local road called the Twelve-Mile Straight. Thus does the tragedy of racial violence in the Jim Crow South shape the narrative, but Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints) is after something more, showing the damage wrought by divisions of class as well as race and the way both a family and a community can be sustained by lies. As Elma raises the children with the help of young black housekeeper Nan, nearly a sister to her, it's evident that her dreams for a better life were short-circuited from the start by the contempt with which folks like her are regarded by other whites. The tangled, often painful relations binding Nan, Elma, and Elma's father also emerge, along with questions regarding the children's paternity, a mystery that drives the narrative forward to a strong, morally riven climax. VERDICT Henderson's highly recommended title delivers a powerful tale of social complexity told in radiant and precise prose. [See Prepub Alert, 3/3/17.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

        Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        July 1, 2017
        The births of two babies and the consequent lynching of a black man launch Henderson's (Ten Thousand Saints, 2011) grim investigation into the fractures of race, class, and family in rural Georgia.Pink little Winnafred and brown Wilson are born in the summer of 1930, allegedly the twin offspring of 18-year-old Elma Jesup, whose father, Juke, accuses field hand Genus Jackson of raping her. Elma reluctantly confirms this, and her fiance, Freddie Wilson, helps Juke string up Genus and then skips town. Wealthy George Wilson is furious with Juke for letting his grandson take the blame--not that anyone wants to bring the lynchers to justice--and is suspicious about these "Gemini twins." Indeed, we hear very soon that Wilson was fathered by Juke with Nan, the Jesups' 14-year-old African-American servant. Juke forces the two girls into this absurd deception for reasons that are somewhat obscure until Henderson's tangled saga has unreeled a good deal farther into the year 1931 and back into a past that includes abuse and violence galore. The details are baroque but appropriate to the epically unjust society scathingly depicted. The reign of terror under which African-Americans live takes perhaps its most appalling form in the stories of Nan and her mother, both forced into long-term sexual subjugation by white men, but Elma and the white girls who work at George Wilson's cotton mill are hardly better off. Juke, in Henderson's most multifaceted and terrifying portrait, clings to the prerogatives of race and gender to hide from himself the fact that he's just trash in the eyes of men like George Wilson, who hold the real power in the South. Despite Henderson's evident compassion for her characters, she gives them hardly a moment of grace from the dark opening to the brutal denouement, which makes the tentatively hopeful epilogue somewhat difficult to credit. Strong medicine, not always easy to swallow, but readers who like a challenge will relish this gifted writer's ambition and grit.

        COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        August 1, 2017
        Henderson follows her acclaimed debut, Ten Thousand Saints (2011), with this totally immersing, provocative historical novela multigenerational saga set in 1930s rural Georgia and framed by the Depression, Prohibition, and Jim Crow racism. When Elma, a sharecropper's daughter, gives birth to twinsone light like her, and one darkshe claims the dark baby is due to her great-great-granddaddy's Indian blood. But her father, Juke, thinks otherwise, as does the probable father, the son of Juke's boss. The violence that follows, fueled by the racism always lurking just under the surface in this isolated town, haunts the family for years. Henderson injects enlightening side plots involving polio, which has left Elma's future husband crippled; sickle-cell anemia, carried by several of Henderson's black characters; and the nascent research into DNA testing, which at least partially solves the deepest of the novel's many secrets. The world of Twelve Mile Straightthe rural back road of this engrossing novel's title, with its illegal distillery, chain gangs, and lynchingswill continue to haunt readers long after they finish the final page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

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From New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Henderson, an audacious American epic set in rural Georgia during the years of the Depression and Prohibition.

Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: in a house full of secrets, two babies—one light-skinned, the other dark—are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.

Despite the prying eyes and curious whispers of the townspeople, Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. But soon it becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together...

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