E-book (.pdf, .epub, and .mobi formats)
$7.95 Available soon
The Darkest Corner
Mildred Barger Herschler
 
 Ages: 14–17
Grades: 9–12
Pages: 224
In the deep South of the 1960s, a white girl’s growing sense of right and wrong alienates her from her conservative father.
Come summer, when the sun blinked down half awake and the haze hovered over the field and lingered in the thick pinewoods beyond, our little Mississippi town would hang its head, fixing to take its summertime snooze … But then one day the town changed, its eyes and ears perked up like a deer’s crossing a meadow, and there I was, right in the middle of it.

Something is awry in Teddy’s small Mississippi town. Everywhere she goes, people are talking about an uproar.

One night Teddy witnesses a cross burning from her attic window. She knows about the frightening White Knights of Mississippi, but she never imagines that her father is one of them. With her best friend, a black girl named Stella, Teddy embraces the civil rights movement in direct opposition to her staunchly conservative father. Over a period of several years, Teddy’s family is undermined by the insidious effects of racism as her father struggles to maintain the status quo, her mother begins to speak out, and Teddy grapples with irreconcilable truths.

Honors
IRA Notable Books for a Global Society
Children's Literature Choice List
Reviews
“A solid portrait of a time and place that will be of historical and personal interest to many middle-school readers and their teachers.”
     —Booklist
“From the first chapter of the book, the reader is riveted. … With wide appeal to the teen audience, this solid book might be used in conjunction with discussions of the Civil Rights era or in book discussion groups.”
     —Voice of Youth Advocates
“This is a detailed depiction of an important historical change from an unusual viewpoint, and Herschler offers some affecting insight into the pressures on this small-town white family.”
     —Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
about the author
Mildred Barger Herschler, a native of West Virginia, was a reporter on one of her hometown daily newspapers before she attended Bethany College, majoring in journalism. She has lived on Long Island and in New York City, where she was the editor of a weekly magazine for marketing executives and a freelance writer for periodicals before moving to the South. Her poetry has appeared in The Crisis, she was a winner of the South Carolina Fiction Project in 1996 with her short story, Martin’s Epiphany, and she was an artist-in-residence in October 1994 at the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the author of a children’s biography of Frederick Douglass and an historical novel, The Walk Into Morning, which received critical acclaim, including a starred review from Kirkus, which called it "A stormy, yet keenly focused, dramatically potent first novel.”
,
She lives in a border community in the foothills of western North and South Carolina. The Darkest Corner is her first young adult novel.