Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
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Historical fiction is most powerful when the invented tale offers stirring human stories that enliven the facts.
In Magic Time, the historical hook is still sharp in many memories: the civil rights campaign in mid-'60s Mississippi. Doug Marlette gives us his fictional take on the turmoil through the saga of Carter Ransom, a New York newspaper columnist.
A terrorist bombing of New York's Institute of Modern Art during the Persian Gulf War triggers a breakdown that sends Ransom back home to Troy, Miss., to recuperate just as a 25-year-old unsolved church firebombing case is being reopened.
The young Ransom, a law school dropout turned novice reporter for the Troy Times, was in love with one of the civil rights workers who came from up North to teach at the Freedom School at the Shiloh Church and was killed when the Ku Klux Klan attacked the building.
Ransom's father, a local judge, presided over the first trial, but now there are allegations that he suppressed evidence to protect his own painful secrets.
Shifting between Ransom's life in the mid-'60s and early '90s, Marlette creates a character whom readers will want to see safely through the struggle to come to terms with the South old and new and with himself then and now.
But the story of the civil rights hostilities is more poignantly told in numerous non-fiction books and documentaries by the people who lived through the cultural watershed. No fiction is needed to intensify the impact of the facts.
Magic Time
By Doug Marlette
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
480 pp., $25
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