The Last Hotel for Women

By Vicki Covington

Book Overview

"Covington is a writer of great skill who doesn't waste a word. Her ear for speech is nearly perfect; her scenes come vividly to the mind's eye, and through it all she never loses the thread of any of the themes that occupy her story--race, religion, lust, lost innocence, family, redemption, baseball. " --San Francisco Chronicle

On Mother's Day, 1961, a busload of freedom riders arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, from "up North." A group of angry white men, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, armed with pipes and clubs, greeted them. Life in this segregated southern city would never be the same. It is to this pivotal moment that novelist Vicki Covington returns in The Last Hotel for Women.

Birmingham crackles with tension--at the foundry where Pete, Dinah Fraley's husband, works; on the baseball field where white and black company teams uneasily take turns; and most of all in Dinah's hotel, where Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor holds court just as he did when Dinah's mother ran the place as a bordello. When Dinah takes in a freedom rider injured in the Mother's Day melee, the fault-lines in and beyond her well-ordered world crack open.

Evoking Alabama's physical, social, and cultural landscape, The Last Hotel for Women revisits an iconic moment in the South's past and allows Covington to redeem its collective history with a story of grace and hope.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0817310037
• ISBN13: 9780817310035
• Release Date: July 1999
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Second best Covington is better than most writer's best

Vicki Covington has written a very good novel about the civil rights struggle in Alabama, that is not nearly as good as two of her previous novels, Gathering Home and Night Ride Home.The family characters,as well as a freedom rider,and especailly, the character of the journalist are all compelling. The problem is that Bull Conner, a well researched historical figure reads more like a well researched historical figure than like a believable character. Still, this is a quibble, because Vicki Covington is our greatest living Southern novelist,so we come to expect more from her than from others. I recommend that you buy this book, but also buy the two previously mentioned superior novels, especially Night Ride Home, which is as good as a contemporary novel gets