The story revolves around a small town is Vermont that the KKK are trying to infiltrate and shows how they go about it, who they approach and the reaction of the townspeople. Apparently it’s based on a true story.
The book is told in free verse from the viewpoints of the townspeople around the time that a black family and a Jewish family are being persecuted by the new KKK group in town. Its set a hundred years ago but could quite believably have been set in recent times and I guess that’s what makes it such a powerful read.
Because the narrative is split between so many people you don’t get a sense of character development and I didn’t get much of a sense of what the town was like before the events in the book. It does deal heavily with social narrative and themes like small town hypocrisy.
4 stars