Year the Colored Sisters Came to Town

By Jacqueline Guidry

Book Overview

Shines a fierce light on the effects of racsm in a cornet of Louisiana and, by doing so, illuminates the hearvy price paid for bigotry. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566492564
• ISBN13: 9781566492560
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Welcome Rain Publishers
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.9" x 0.8" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Good narrator

I enjoyed being introduced to rural Cajun Louisiana in the 1950's by the delightful Vivien Leigh. Her delightful voice carried me through a time and place full of difficulties and contradictions the ten year-old was trying to understand.A well written, easy read but one that leaves you with much to think about.

exquisite writing

It has been a long time since I have read a book this well written. The author has taken life in the 50's South and shown us the everyday cracks and crevices that can mold and/or alter lives. She is to be congratulated for an incredible book. I eagerly await ner next one.

TEMPESTUOUS CHANGES SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD

Jacqueline Guidry - a Louisiana Cajun by birth - has taken a turmoil-rocked time, the mid-1950s in the South, and allowed us to view the events that would forever change America through the eyes of a ten-year-old child. Her young narrator, Vivien Leigh Dubois, lives near a small Louisiana town, Ville d'Angelle, with her mother and father and her little sister Mavis (whose place in life is seemingly to continuously irritate Vivien Leigh). The family is Catholic, and the girls attend Holy Rosary School. They enjoy a fairly idyllic existence among their extended family and friends - but the time is 1957, and things in the American South (and the rest of the nation, of course) are about to change forever.The `troubles' in Little Rock - the attempt by black children to attend Little Rock's Central High School - are of course in the news. Since the institution of slavery in America, race has played a part in our lives that we cannot ever erase - the scars from it, even if the wounds were somehow miraculously healed today, would be with us for decades to come. Memories retain pain suffered, even if it is buried for years - it must be faced and dealt with if we are to learn from it and pass through it. When two black nuns arrive in the town and appear at mass one Sunday - and when the townspeople learn that they are new teachers, to work in the otherwise all-white Catholic school - fears raise their heads, tempers flare, and friendships between blacks and whites that have been (at best) tenuous for years begin to fray and snap.Vivien Leigh sees the sisters' presence as a problem - she sees them as `out of place', only because that is what she has been taught, if not directly, then by example. It is far easier for a child to come to accept change, however, than it is for adults, who have lived with their beliefs for most of their lives. The family's housekeeper, a hard-working, honest and lovable black woman named Aussie, and her young daughter Marydale (who is the `best friend' of young Mavis) are caught up in the hard feelings and impending changes like everyone else. The relationship between them and the Dubois family, which goes back for years, is bruised to the point of never properly healing - which, although each of the sides recognizes as a sad thing, is also seen as inevitable, something with a bad taste that the simply have to accept.Guidry's characters are endowed by the author with distinct, honest and accurate voices - the rite of passage through which they are traveling takes its toll of each of them, and changes each of them uniquely. The care and compassion - and sheer literary talent - with which the author relates this story makes this a book that anyone who wishes to understand (and we all NEED to understand) the troubled times depicted here, as well as the challenges that remain before us, should read. It's also moving and entertaining, and I can recommend it highly.

The Indelible Year

The characters in this book will stay with you for a long time. They're as real and unpredictable as your cousins, and caught up in the events of Ville d'Angelle, Louisiana, in 1957, they'll pull you in and keep you spellbound until--like all good stories--you don't want it to end. The varied and complex reactions of one family to the fact that two black nuns are assigned to teach at the town's all-white Catholic elementary school form the framework in which the two daughters, 10-year-old narrator Vivien Leigh and her seven-year-old sister Mavis, come to realize how they feel and how they're expected to feel about the black people they've known all their lives. Details like fig picking and speech patterns provide a passionate sense of place, while a change-of-life baby, a visit from Baton Rouge "sheets," and a divisive wager propel the plot. Guidry has a fine sense of how the smallest change affects and is affected by the larger landscape. This book is a very good read.

The Year the Colored Sisters Came to Town

This book has living, breathing characters in a real-life situation. The story is compelling from the first sentence to the last with a subtle undercurrent throughout. Set in the South in the late 1950s, the book tells the story of residents of a small Louisiana town. They don't know it yet, but they are about to participate in events that will change their town and their country forever. One summer Sunday, two African American nuns arrive at church for Mass. No one is too alarmed, assuming they are just passing through -- although there is some question of why they didn't go to Mass at the "colored church" instead. But the nuns are back again the next week. And soon, the townfolk learn that they're staying to teach first and fifth grades in the all-white Catholic school. No one seems happy about it, but some are more unhappy than others, especially parents who form The Concerned Citizens group and another group of men from Baton Rouge known as "the sheets." Told from the viewpoint of a 10-year-old girl, this story will keep you turning pages all night long.