The Twelve-Mile Straight audiobook

Florence , Georgia, Cotton County, The Twelve Mile Straight road in 1930's , depressed times on a farm. Lynching and racism that makes you sick, women abused, deception and lies and secrets, some genuinely evil people. In the midst of it all a "colored" and a white baby are born . They called them Gemini twins, and they wanted you to believe they were born of the same mother at the same time but of two fathers and because of that lie a man is lynched . Up front I have to say this is dark, gruesome, sad and brutal. It was hard to read but more than likely so reflective of the time and place and so important not to forget that as atrocious as things were , this was what happened in that time and place. Even with that, why was I was compelled to keep reading? I've given up on books that were hard to take before but I just had to find out what happens to the innocent children. I was also compelled by the writing. Even with the third person narrative, the thoughts, motivations of the main characters are readily reflected. Chapters move back and forth in time before the babies were born and even before that to the earlier lives of the adults and the transitions were fairly smooth. The past sheds light on the present. My complaints : it's a little too long at 560 pages and the secrets revealed in the end were obvious much earlier in the book . It's a real saga of families, black and white, a time of historical shame when black women were controlled and abused by white men, when the white women had little or no control of their lives. You can read the book description and some other reviews for more specifics on the story and the characters. I'll just say that if you're up for a gritty, gut punching read of what I would say is historically significant, then I'd recommend it. There is within some love to offset the things that happen. 3.5 stars but I have to round up . I received an advanced copy of this book from Ecco/HarperCollins through Edelweiss.

George Wilson owned two hundred acres of land along the Twelve-Mile Straight Road in 1930's Cotton County,Georgia. Additionally, he owned the cotton mill. The Jesups were the principal sharecropping family since the turn of the century. Juke Jesup's daughter Elma and Negro maid Nan lived with Juke in a house provided by George Wilson while Negro pickers like Genus Jackson lived in windowless shacks.Elma Jesup and Nan grew up together and worked side by side in the cotton and cornfields. Upon the death of Ketty, Negro midwife and Nan's mother, Nan took over the local midwifery duties since town doctor Manford Rawls refused to make house calls.The trouble began when Elma and Nan, both unmarried, became pregnant. Juke Jesup kept them hidden in a shack without windows until the babies were born. The tightly knit opinionated community was informed that Elma birthed Gemini twins since the infant girl was white and the newborn boy was dark skinned. It was assumed that Freddie Wilson, grandson of George Wilson and Elma's fiance fathered baby girl Winnifred. Who fathered son Wilson? Juke helps disseminate information indicating that his neighbors should rise up, do what is necessary and go after Genus, Elma's supposed rapist. Kind, gentle Genus is hanged. Freddie Wilson, present at the lynching, helps himself to Genus' alligator boots. When newspapers run the story, there is Juke, front and center, relating the story and pointing a finger at Freddie Wilson. Juke plies Sheriff Cleave and others with his self-produced moonshine. Reporters interested in the Gemini twins were given Mason jars of gin to make sure they reported the "correct" story.Subsequent financial woes landing on the Jesup doorstep encouraged Elma and Nan, with twins in tow, to agree to blood tests for monetary gain at Emory University to be conducted by Dr. Manford Rawl's son, Oliver. Twins Winna and Wilson are unalike and perhaps their twinning was not to be believed. An undercurrent of many secrets existed, but, what would be the repercussions of these revelations?"The Twelve-Mile Straight" by Eleanor Henderson is a historical novel dealing with the haves and the have-nots often based upon race, gender and class. The Depression Years in the Deep South were wrought with intolerance some of which exists to the present day. Difficult to read at times, nonetheless, a thought provoking tome.Thank you Ecco Books/HarperCollins Publishers and Edelweiss for the opportunity to read and review "The Twelve-Mile Straight".

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 sharecroppers daughter. Field hand Genus Jackson is accused of her rape. He is lynched and dragged down The-Twelve-Mile-Straight. In the aftermath, the farms inhabitants are forced to contend with their compliantly in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured. Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can. As startling revelations mount, a web of lies begins to collapse around the family. This is a family saga set in a time of historical shame . The storyline goes back and fourth giving the back stories of the characters. This book is beautifully written and the reader gets a feeling of a time and place. Fans of historical fiction will love this book.I would like to thank NetGalley, HarperCollins Uk 4th Estate and the author Eleanor Henderson for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

**3.75-4**Eleanor Henderson had me hooked from page one – with the mystery of these two babies born with different skin colors (no spoiler – this is part of the book jacket copy). Then she reeled me in with the unimaginable actions of one of the characters against her own daughter. And I had to know: “How on Earth could she…?” and “Why on Earth would she?” And then… other events occur that had me flipping pages for more answers.The stakes are high early-on in this story that is a reminder of the country’s history of hatred. And even though slavery had been abolished some 60-plus years earlier, its after-effects and growing forms of bigotry were alive and well in 1930s Georgia. The book covers every misdeed and reprehensible human behavior imaginable: racism, infidelity, KKK group-think mentality, murder, rape, illegal activity. This novel paints a clear picture of human ignorance and offers no excuses for it – just a telling reality of the baseness of which man is capable. The language in this story is lovely and poetic (Take, for instance, the initial pages and the description of the babies): In their overstuffed nest, with the delicate claws of their fingers intertwined and their eyelids trembling with blue veins, they looked like a pair of baby chicks, their white skullcaps like two halves of the single eggshell from which they’d hatched. Only if you looked closely – and people did – could you see that the girl was pink as a piglet and the boy was brown.”You may feel a sense of remove at times from the characters with the third-person omniscient telling, which also includes a great deal of backstory for multiple, multiple characters. It’s a family saga, so don’t let the 539-page count scare you. Sagas are long, and there is much to share, and much to be revealed about the themes of family, sisterhood, blood ties, faith, redemption, and love.

One of the great joys of reading is discovering an debut author whose work just blows you away. Eleanor Henderson did that to me with her 2011 novel Ten Thousand Saints, set in 1987 New York City and Vermont. It is such an amazing book (made into a movie in 2015), I put it on my Most Compelling Books of 2011 list.I was thrilled to hear that Henderson would be at the Book Expo this year signing copies of her followup novel, The Twelve-Mile Straight. I was first in a long line of people, all eager to tell her how much we loved Ten Thousand Saints and how we couldn't wait to read this new one.The setting for The Twelve-Mile Straight is a small town in Depression-era rural Georgia in 1930. Young Elma Jessup gives birth to two babies- one black, one white. Her daughter is the child of the grandson of the wealthy man who owns the farm that her sharecropper father Juke works. Elma and Juke accuse a young black man who works for Juke, Genus Jackson, of raping Elma resulting in Elma's son.Juke, who made moonshine on the side that he sold to men in the town, convinced others to join him in making Genus pay by lynching him, dragging his body behind a truck and leaving it in the road in town. The death scene is horrific, and we soon learn that there is more to this story.Elma's mother died when she was a baby, and Elma was raised by Ketty, their black housekeeper. Ketty's daughter Nan grew up with Elma, and they were best friends, even though Elma went to school and Nan worked with Ketty, eventually learning from her how to be a midwife.As the story unfolds, we find out that there are many secrets in this house, secrets that will affect everyone who lives there for years to come. People are curious about Elma's two babies, and their two different fathers, and Elma eventually meets a doctor, Oliver, who wants to study this unique phenomenon.Oliver is a terrific character; he suffers from polio and he wants to be a research doctor. He is fascinated and compassionate towards Elma and her babies. There is a couple, Sarah and Jim, who came from up North and work on Juke's land. Why they are there is a mystery, but they provide company for Elma, for which she is grateful. And gentle, quiet Genus is such a sweet young man, his murder is devastating.There are some powerful scenes in the story, including a baptism for the babies, where several townsfolk turn out believing that at least one of the babies "has the devil in him." Oliver's memory of his time spent on a ship filled with other polio patients because people feared catching polio was heartbreaking.Henderson creates such a sense of time and place, you can feel the blazing summer sun and see the dust kicking up on the twelve-mile straight road. The reader is transported to this world, one that she conjured from stories her father told of his growing up, one of eight children born to a sharecropper.Her writing is so precise, it feels like she worked to craft the perfect sentence for each paragraph. I got so lost in The Twelve-Mile Straight that frequently I found myself completely tuning out my surroundings, losing all track of time and place.But it is the relationship between Elma and Nan that is at the heart of this emotional, moving story. The two women are as close as sisters, but it is the secrets between them that drive the momentum of the book to its shattering conclusion.I highly recommend The Twelve-Mile Straight, and if you haven't read Ten Thousand Saints, pick that one up too. I'm not the only one who feels this way, The Twelve-Mile Straight has made many Best of Fall lists.

WOW! I was not surprised that this novel was a tough read, given the subject matter, but I was surprised that it was so good! The author made rural Georgia in the 1930s come alive with her descriptions of daily life and the struggles to make ends meet. The characters were well developed, as the story was told from varying viewpoints. The selfishness of human motivations were laid bare in this book, sparing no one. I loved how the truths in the story were revealed slowly, in layers, reaching backward and forward in time, until it was a fully formed yet imperfect flower. My mind keeps going back to The Twelve-Mile Straight and the lives lived and lost there.

I loved this book! It was written with such authenticity that you almost thought it was a work of non-fiction. You can tell the author did a lot of research on the area even down to the cadence in the deep south during that era. It was uncomfortable to read about the mistreatment of many of these characters as the author makes you feel like you are right in the room. Well done!

The book was based on Florence, Georgia, Cotton County, The Twelve Mile Straight road in 1930's, depressed times on a farm. Lynching and racism that makes you sick, women abused, deception and lies and secrets, some genuinely evil people. In the midst of it all a "coloured" and a white baby are born . They called them Gemini twins, and they wanted you to believe they were born of the same mother at the same time but of two fathers and because of that lie a man is lynched . Up front I have to say this is dark, gruesome, sad and brutal. It was hard to read but more than likely so reflective of the time and place and so important not to forget that as atrocious as things were , this was what happened in that time and place. Even with that, why was I was compelled to keep reading? I've given up on books that were hard to take before but I just had to find out what happens to the innocent children. I was also compelled by the writing. Even with the third person narrative, the thoughts, motivations of the main characters are readily reflected. Chapters move back and forth in time before the babies were born and even before that to the earlier lives of the adults and the transitions were fairly smooth. The past sheds light on the present. My complaints : it's a little too long at 560 pages and the secrets revealed in the end were obvious much earlier in the book . It's a real saga of families, black and white, a time of historical shame when black women were controlled and abused by white men, when the white women had little or no control of their lives. You can read the book description and some other reviews for more specifics on the story and the characters. I'll just say that if you're up for a gritty, gut punching read of what I would say is historically significant, then I'd recommend it. There is within some love to offset the things that happen. 3.5 stars but I have to round up .

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5The Twelve Mile Straight is set in the Deep South (Cotton County, Georgia), 1930. An era where rich white men have all the power, crackerjack whites have much less, and Negroes are at the bottom of the totem pole. Two babies are born in summer 1930, allegedly twins birthed by Elma Jesup, the daughter of share cropperJuke Jesup. But one baby is white and the other brown. Elma’s boyfriend is the grandson of the richest man in town. The field hand Genus Jackson is accused of raping Elma and is lynched and murdered by Freddy (the boyfriend) and Juke (the dad.)That’s the premise for this southern gothic novel that delves into race, class and family in rural Georgia. This book is dark with lots of violence, but the storyline kept me reading late into the night.ATY Goodreads Challenge - 2022Prompt #11 - A book with gothic elements

Je viens de le refermer. Quel voyage ! Je vais attendre avant d’en dire plus.

When I finished the last page of this book I had to hold still for several minutes to let it all sink in. The characters will stay with me and I will puzzle over them for a long time. An unforgettable book.

Set in the deep South of Georgia, this expertly written novel brings to light 1930's troubled times. We are intimately shown the complex relationships between a wealthy landowner, his hired farm hand and his negro housekeeper as well as their families. The characters are so complex and multi-layered. You feel for them sometimes and can sympathize while other men are just true monsters. So well written I felt like I was part of the world they lived in. One lie to protect the name of the farm hand spirals out of control and ruins so many lives. This epic novel changes so many perceptions.

A really good, but really long read

The Twelve Mile Straight by Eleanor Henderson is an epic historical novel set in Georgia in 1930. It was reminiscent of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men in both the style and atmosphere.Back in the 1930's the deep South continued to be a divide between the white and black Americans. There were lies and lynchings, rapes and violence, and people turning a blind eye everywhere. It is not a comfortable read. It is deeply disturbing.In contrast there was love and loyalty between two girls... one black and one white.The reader gets a glimpse of life in rural, dusty Georgia. The atmosphere of cruelty and distrust has been perfectly captured by Eleanor Henderson.The Twelve Mile Straight is a snapshot in time. I hope we have all learnt from the lessons of the past. Eleanor Henderson has opened eyes to the horrors suffered by the black Americans in the South. It is a brutal story combined with awful elements of truth.A powerful but disturbing read.I received this book for free. A favourable review was not required and all views expressed are my own.

This is a very detailed book and an intricately woven storyline. It’s a book you have to give yourself to and take the time to absorb it. A lot of the content is very raw -things happen that might offend some people but I believe it is written the way things most likely happened in the south in this era of time. I loved the two main women and the author makes them extremely likable and real. Life wasn’t and isn’t always pretty and this book really shows this. It also shows that in those hard times - humans can find a way to overcome that. I highly recommend this one...