'What a wonderful surprise Denise Nicholas's first novel is. Perhaps the best work of fiction ever done about the civil rights movement.' Newsday (New York) Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.' The Washington Post 'Surely the best work of fiction about the civil rights movement since Ernest J. Praise for Denise Nicholas's Freshwater Road:

In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an unforgettable story that-more than ten years after first appearing in print-continues to be one of the most cherished works of Civil Rights fiction. All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer.īy summer's end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the questions that preoccupy her-about violence and nonviolence, about race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family bonds. Finding inner strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her adult students for their showdown with the county registrar. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the South represents. When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she's assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. Gaines as the most important novelists documenting this era. Nicholas herself has been praised repeatedly over the years for her beautiful prose and is continually mentioned along with Alice Walker and Ernest J. Freshwater Road has been called one of the best novels written about the Civil Rights Movement. From award-winning actress Denise Nicholas: a ten-year anniversary reissue of her powerful and dramatic coming of age story set in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964.

Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas