Book Review
The Book of Marie By TERRY KAY
Reviewed by PEGGY BARNETT
Marie is an unusual girl whom Cole and his classmates meet on the first day of their senior year in high school. As the football team takes its traditional walk through the hall, admired by all, Marie is the only one who does not give way to their progress. She follows this daring deed by putting down one of the stars' teasing with an outrageous request at the local drugstore hangout.

Cole, previously the smartest person in the class and the quarterback, is the only one who meets with her approval. He tells the story in accounts written for a friend, also a psychiatrist, as he prepares to go to his fiftieth high school reunion. His accounts and Marie's letters, written over the intervening years, form the book.

We know Georgian writer Terry Kay from books such as The Year the Lights Came on, The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene, and To Dance with the White Dog.. He grew up near Washington and understands the South and its struggles. His character Marie, who did not want to move to Georgia, is perhaps a little unbelievable as a teenage wise woman. She is brave and outspoken and attractive, and challenges the culture of the small Southern town setting.

She and Cole become friends and she accepts his class ring, though their relationship does not move beyond friendship, in spite of his efforts. These events are told in "flashback," as Cole reminisces. The reader is aware of the powerful influence Marie has on Cole, but after her prophetic and anger-invoking graduation speech, she leaves town and they never meet again in person.

Cole goes to Atlanta to work and go to college. He is a bystander when a young black woman is killed in a protest demonstration. He catches her as she falls, and their picture is blazoned across newspapers, ruining his local reputation. He escapes to the north, becomes a college teacher, and settles in Vermont.

Meanwhile, back in his hometown, the home of a black family that Marie had befriended is burned, scarring one of the children he knew. The arsonist is never found, and life goes on unchanged at first. By the time of the reunion, however, things have changed, in that town and across the South.

The Book of Marie is an absorbing novel. It is available at the Mary Willis Library.

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