barbarahallforrest 's review for:

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

3.0

---

A riveting page turner -- I read it in almost a single sitting. A modern day morality play that deals with racism, coming of age, and religion in a North Carolina neighborhood. A newly wealthy family builds a large house in an established neighborhood, where their property borders on the dwelling and property of a mother and son. The inevitable Greek-like tragedy is set into motion when the 2 teenage neighbors fall in love, and a lawsuit that pits the 2 families against each other. The ending, though shocking, left me both gutted and hopeful. Fowler tells the story in a third person narrative whose narrator is "we" -- a device that effectively draws in the reader's complicity in the story's complicated morality.