On 2006-12-06 James A. Gentry, Jacksonville, FL USA wrote: Andrews successfully and deftly integrates several intertwining narratives and characters into one intricate, yet very accessible narrative. _Appalachee Red_ is at once a novelized study of the complexity of race relations in the South from around the turn of the century until the onset of the Civil Rights Movement. It is constructed around the birth of the child of an affluent white father and his African American maid. The child is eventually sent North to live with the mother´s relatives but later returns to the town of his birth as an adult intent on receiving what is due him.
As the story unfolds, several larger than life characters appear who are almost Homeric in proportion. Their stories move the narrative in several directions and expand it almost to the breaking point, but Andrews always manages to remain in control. Rather than detract from one another, the narratives complement one another, always reminding the reader of the interconnectedness of our lives.
Andrew´s knack for storytelling makes this a can´t-put-down book. Even amidst the daily violence, fear, injustice, and degradation of southern life for African Americans, his story is uproarously funny but never at the expense or dignity of his subjects; the seriousness of their plight is always upfront. However, not only are African Americans the veritable prisoners of the social system; white Americans, too, find themselves imprisoned by the very system they fight so hard to uphold.
The only regret I have about this novel is that it took me so long to find it.. And summed up by saying Storytelling at Its Very Best!. Currently Appalachee Red (James Baldwin Prize Novel) has an overall rating of 10 over 10.
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Richard Bausch claimed Bawdy and sometimes horrifying, hilarious on the way to being tragic, Raymond Andrews´s Muskhogean County novels tell of black life in the Deep South from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the 1960s, from the days of mules and white men with bullwhips to the moment when the pendulum began to swing.Andrews´s first novel, Appalachee Red, is one of hard labor in the midday sun and sweet jukebox nights, of howling passion and gunpoint negotiations, of a mean white sheriff and of the enormous red-skinned black man who changed it all.
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