Books Read: Melissa Foster - Have No Shame

The racially-charged prejudice of the deep South forces eighteen-year-old Alison Tillman to confront societal norms—and her own beliefs—when she discovers the body of a hate crime victim, and the specter of forbidden love turns her safe, comfortable world upside down.

Alison has called Forrest Town, Arkansas home for the past eighteen years. Her mother’s Blue Bonnet meetings, her father toiling night and day on the family farm, and the division of life between the whites and the blacks are all Alison knows. The winter of 1967, just a few months before marrying her high school sweetheart, Alison finds the body of a black man floating in the river, and she begins to view her existence with new perspective. The oppression and hate of the south, the ugliness she once was able to avert her eyes from, now demands her attention.

When a secretive friendship with a young black man takes an unexpected romantic turn, Alison is forced to choose between her predetermined future, and the dangerous path that her heart yearns for.

Although this week I'm concentrating mainly on crime fiction, today I'm also doing this review for Melissa Foster's Have No Shame as part of the blog tour being coordinated by Fiction Addiction Book Tours.  

Set in the late 1960s Have No Shame tells the story of a sheltered small-town girl Alison who finds her eyes opened to the goings on in her town when she discovers the body of a coloured man in a river whilst on her way home.  This shocks her to realise that people hated him so much for the colour of his skin that they would beat a man to death.

This discovery seems to open Alison's eyes to what is going on around her, and the realisation just how close to home it is, but she is no longer willing to sit back and be quiet as is expected of her especially when her rebellious sister Maggie returns home from New York full of news as to how different an integrated life is.

And when she meets handsome Jackson, a soldier who has just returned home from Vietnam who is the dead man's nephew, she questions whether she really loves her fiance Jimmy Lee who she's supposed to be getting married to in a few weeks if she can have strong feelings for another man.   

Alison soon finds herself in the midst of the movement for change in her town and is surprised that more people are involved than she at first realised, especially when one of them turns out to be her own mother.  Can they all really make a difference or will things continue the way they always have done?

This is a story that will make you think as to how lucky we are to live in the generation that we do, I cannot even begin to imagine what it must have been like for people to live in a segregated society like that. It's a romance story with a difference and one that stayed with me long after I finished reading.

Melissa is also offering one reader the chance to win a paperback copy of Have No Shame, enter via the Rafflecopter link below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway