Boys

by Roger Newman

Overview

Brotherhood is more than skin-deep.

After Alex's family is killed by the Ku Klux Klan during the Great Depression, he takes refuge in the barn of a nearby dairy farm. The family that owns the dairy, including their young son Pete, take in Alex and raise the boys together. Pete and Alex consider themselves brothers and together they navigate the Jim Crow racial intolerance of the rural South, a challenge experienced differently because Pete is White and Alex is Black.

Anticipating European war, Pete and Alex join a segregated US Army. The brothers discover their own identities amid the crucible of battle, leading them to separate for many years as they continue their careers in the Army. They finally reunite at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in 1969. Confronting escalating racial and civilian hostility in response to the Civil Rights and antiwar movements, Alex must find those responsible for the brutal off-base beating of Pete. He must also reengage with his childhood and what it means to be a Black man with a White brother.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888245712
Publisher:	Koehler Books
Publication date:	01/14/2025
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Roger Newman is the author of a series of medical thrillers, Occam's Razor, Two Drifters, and What Becomes, and the historical fiction novel Will O' the Wisp: Madness, War, and Recompense. Dr. Newman is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, specializing in the care of women with multiple gestations. He has authored almost two hundred scientific papers, a dozen book chapters, and the award-winning and bestselling When You're Expecting Twins, Triplets, or Quads; Fourth Edition. He served as the national president of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and was voted by his peers as one of the "Best Doctors in America" for thirty consecutive years. He and his wife, Diane, live on the Ashley River in Charleston, South Carolina.

Editorial Reviews

2025-01-06
In Newman’s historical novel, a Great Depression–era Black youth loseshis family to racial violence and is raised by a white family in the South.

Pete Barnes finds a terrified young Black boy named Alex Broadnax—shivering from the cold and covered in blood—hiding in his father’s milk barn in Leakesville, North Carolina. Alex witnessed the murder of his entire family by the Ku Klux Klan and is now on the run. Poppa Barnes, despite his unabashed racism, takes Alex in and puts him to work, and he grows up side by side with Pete, working the farm and attending school (albeit a segregated one for Black children). Pete quickly comes to love Alex and sees him as another brother, but Alex, by far the more thoughtful of the two, never loses sight of the distance between himself and his adopted family, a bitter awareness movingly captured by the author: “I was never a son to Poppa. Every night at dinner we thanked God for his enveloping love, but come Sunday, it was clear that love did not extend to me.” Immediately after graduating high school, both boys join the army and are sent to Europe to fight in World War II. While there, Alex is stung by the military’s refusal to acknowledge his heroism and Pete wrestles with his resentment toward his father and the Baptist faith he tries to abandon. The relationship between Alex and Pete is a profoundly complex one and is rendered with impressive subtlety by Newman, who admirably refuses any facile sentimentality. Alex is a particularly memorable protagonist—it is both fascinating and heartbreaking to see how he manages to maintain both gratitude and anger in his heart in equal measure. The novel is affecting but not cloyingly manipulative, an increasingly rare accomplishment in the field of contemporary literature.

A powerful and nuanced novel about racial tensions in 20th-century America.

Kirkus Reviews