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I hope you’ve read our interview with the August Man of the Month, George Pelecanos.  Earlier this week, I attended a reading from his new book, The Turnaround at a nifty little independent bookstore, Politics and Prose.   I arrived forty-five minutes early to discover a huge crowd.  My wait was rewarded as one of the owners of the bookstore told a story about George applying for a job there before his first book was published.  By the time this introduction was made, it was standing room only!  George read  a passage from The Turnaround, about three white kids in the early 1970’s driving into an all-black neighborhood to harass the black kids living there, he was reading to a packed, standing-room-only house of fans.  George is a hometown boy in the city of Washington DC. His novels set in DC have captured the folks who live in the area, and his work on The Wire as a Writer and Producer has attracted a diverse crowd as well.

After the reading, he did a question and answer session and then a book signing.  Here he is, signing books for All Things Girl!

The Turnaround is about an event that changed many lives in 1972….and becomes more complex when, thirty-five years later, paths of two of the boys-now-men cross again. I was hooked by the story of every-day life that Pelecanos effortlessly engages you in.  We peek into the lives of two groups of teenagers living similar lives - with loving families and dreams of the future.  The contrast is, however, that one group of teens are black, and the other group are white.  When Alex, Billy and Peter head out in a car belonging to one of their fathers, you can hear the music and smell the testosterone.  They end up at a turnaround…where one got away, one was killed, and the other, scarred for life.  The lives of the black kids, Charles, Raymond and James are forever changed that night as well.

Thirty-five years later, the paths of Alex (who was beaten) and one of the black men, Raymond Monroe, crosses. Monroe is a physical therapist at Walter Reed Army hospital. Alex has lost a son in the Iraq wars. In the believable world created by Pelecanos in The Turnaround, we find that the bad guys have redeeming qualities and the good guys have faults.   Can the choices in life and the wounds we suffer cause us to lose our humanity?  Can the errors of our youth be redeemed and lives turned around?  Pelecanos shows us in a novel classified as crime fiction, but shown to be more…a fine telling of hopes, shattered dreams, courage and redemption.

We’d love for you to explore The Turnaround yourself.  In fact, during the signing, the books he signed for All Things Girl will go to FIVE lucky readers!!  How can you win?  Comment here!

Posted by Deb in ATG Giveaways, Book Talk |

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under ATG Giveaways, Book Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.