EARLY PRAISE FOR THE SUMMER WE GOT SAVED

"Pat, this book resonates so much with me.   I finished college in 1965 and went straight to work as a reporter for a Montgomery television station.   The big story was civil rights, and one of the early events I covered was the crash of Ryan deGraffenreid's plane.   So all this is familiar territory and brings back lots of memories.   But what you've done goes far beyond that.   If I had no personal connection at all, it would captivate me with your lovely telling." - Robert Inman, author of Captain Saturday.

"In my opinion, you have created a winner ....took me back to the hopeful and yet fearful days   ....of the early sixties.   You caught perfectly that omnipresent feeling of menace we all had ....the feeling that anything could happen, but that we couldn't help but triumph eventually."- Dr. Scott Bates, Board of Directors, Highlander Center.

"Devoto skillfully captures the wrenching dislocation of the emerging Civil Rights movement in this affecting novel...her characters ring true as their worlds collide and their lives intersect, leaving them all changed forever. A remarkable read."
--Lalita Tademy, author of Cane River

"Amazingly powerful and moving."--Leslie Wells, author of The Curing Season

"Devoto's episodic, nonchronological structure creates potent narrative pull, but her evenhanded, affectionate treatment of her complex characters, each struggling to make sense of their changing world, is the novel's greatest asset." - Publisher's Weekly

THE SUMMER WE GOT SAVED

From the author of the critically acclaimed Out of the Night That Covers Me and My Last Days as Roy Rogers comes a triumphant and unforgettable new novel that masterfully interweaves the lives of three people amid the changing South of the 1960s.

Tab is fast growing into an opinionated, intransigent teenager, appalled by the attitudes of her liberal Berkeley-based aunt--until Aunt Eugenia comes for a summer visit and whisks Tab, and her sister Tina, off to a strange place in the mountains of Tennessee where integration flourishes.

Charles, Tab's father, has always conformed to the political dictates of family, going back to the time of slavery--until this summer, when he sees new hope for his community and his state in the guise of a New South candidate for governor.

Maudie, once a childhood friend of Tab's, couldn't care less about what happens to the struggles of her black brothers and sisters, as long as she gets to leave the confines of the Tuskegee Polio Clinic--until she lands in the backwoods of Alabama and starts a voting school for members of the Word of Truth Missionary Baptist Church.

This summer, none of them set out to be involved in the swirling winds of change that are engulfing the country, and if they're lucky, they won't be--or maybe, if they're lucky, they will.

 
Today the KKK plaque faces the wall.   It's on a small building just off the square in Pulaski, Tennessee.
Tuskegee Clinic -This is the old polio clinic at Tuskegee. It was located next to the main hospital and served African Americans.
Church -The Word of Truth Missionary Baptist Church, located just off of Highway 72 in North Alabama.