The Activist's Daughter

by Ellyn Bache

Overview

The year is 1963, the peak of the U.S. civil rights movement. A quarter of a million people have just marched on Washington, D.C., where they have been galvanized by Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. In rebellion against her unconventional mother's passionate involvement in the struggle for racial equality, 17-year-old Beryl Rosinsky flees Washington and enrolls at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here, in the heart of the segregated South, Beryl enters a strange world of paradoxes: a culture in which southern gentility masks deep-seated prejudice; a place in which protesters politely march single file on the sidewalks outside of "whites-only" shops; a "liberal" university that imposes a gender-based double standard of behavior upon its students. Though Beryl struggles to blend in, to conform, to reject her destiny as her mother's daughter, her encounters with racism, bigotry, and hypocrisy ultimately force her to come to terms with her family's values - and teach her who she really is.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781889199146
Publisher:	Ellyn Bache
Publication date:	07/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	296,060
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Ellyn Bache is the award-winning author of nine novels, including "Safe Passage," which was made into a film starring Susan Sarandon, and a short story collection that won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize.

Editorial Reviews

A young woman's gradual commitment to the civil rights movement of the 1960s is the theme of Bache's solid and absorbing third novel (following Festival in Fire Season). Beryl Rosinsky's eventual involvement in the struggle is in ironic contrast to her initial determination to rebel against her mother's activism, spurred when Beryl's father's career was destroyed by the McCarthy hearings. Rejecting all attempts by her liberal Jewish family to interest her in social justice, Beryl believes she's escaped their influence when she enters the University of North Carolina as a freshman. Bache nicely captures the madras and Weejuns conformity of Chapel Hill in 1963. There, inevitably, Beryl witnesses the racism and bigotry that entwine with the gentility and social propriety of the South. Longing to fit in, Beryl nonetheless empathizes with the pain of those who don't. These include her roommates, Ashley Vance and Susan Tillery: the former is a blonde debutante impregnated by a South American diplomat's son and scorned by both families; the latter thinks she may be a lesbian. Beryl's moody first lover, David Lazar, left with a shriveled leg after childhood polio, also is aware that he will always be different. Meanwhile, her family periodically urges her to remain faithful to her religious heritage. Outwardly, Beryl remains resolutely uninvolved until the day she reacts instinctively to an act of plain meanness and finds she's taken the first step toward activism. Bache capably reflects the complexities of this volatile period, including the shock of the Kennedy assassination, and her well-etched characters animate this earnest portrait of a young woman's awakening. (May) FYI: Bache's novel Safe Passage became a 1995 movie.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Bache (Safe Passage, LJ 9/1/88) brings a new twist to the classic tale of teenage rebellion. In the tumultuous years of the 1960s, Beryl longs for a normal family. Instead, she finds herself in a house churning with liberal ideas, a house she dreams of escaping. Her revolutionary mother in particular is a constant source of embarrassment. Beryl's liberation finally occurs when she enters the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Upon arrival, however, she discovers ugly rot beneath the veneer of Southern hospitality; the blatant racism and religious intolerance are impossible to ignore. Beryl tries her hardest to stay neutral, even after she falls for the handicapped David, who hangs out with the campus radicals, yet she soon realizes that even an unwilling daughter must sometimes follow in her mother's footsteps. Though at times the story drifts, Bache has created a realistic teenager in Beryl, a character filled with contradictions and searching for acceptance. Recommended.-Erin Cassin, "Library Journal"

Library Journal

Bache (Safe Passage, 1993, etc.) delivers an uneven tale of a girl who undergoes typical freshman-year college experiences in highly unusual times.

It's 1963, and Beryl Rosinsky's father is a blacklisted architect, her mother a civil rights activist who is away for weeks at a time demonstrating against racism in the South. Beryl, preoccupied with college plans, can't stay far enough away from her mother's radical beliefs. Leah Rosinsky wants Beryl to pick a school near their home in Washington D.C., but then great-grandmother Bubby dies while visiting the family, and Beryl, feeling irrationally responsible, sinks into depression. To cheer her up, father and grandmother urge her to attend the University of North Carolina, thinking that a change of scene will be beneficial. There, Beryl discovers an unfamiliar world: sororities, stern housemothers, a roommate who's the blondest girl she's ever met, another who spends hours listening to "Louie Louie." Beryl learns to tease her hair and wear Weejuns, but she doesn't quite fit in with this bunch. She spends most of her time with the moody David Lazar, who's bitter about his paralyzed leg. David hangs around the fringes of a liberal crowd, and in their company Beryl becomes more aware of Chapel Hill's racial politics. She grows curious about the picketers in front of Packard's, with its whites-only lunch counter; she notices that Emily, the dorm's only black student, is quietly excluded; she introduces the dorm to bagels and noodle pudding and comes to appreciate her Jewish heritage. But it's not until a roommate is pressured into marriage that Beryl's own activism blossoms and she and her mother edge toward rapprochement.

The writing is often pedestrian, the emotional core of the mother-daughter relationship thinly sketched. But Bache's warm humor and her zest for period detail make for an engrossing portrait of an era.

Kirkus Reviews