A Guide to Fiction Set in North Carolina

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The Read North Carolina Novels blog is produced and maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Bowen, Sandra E.

Sandra E. Bowen. The Cul-lud Schoo-ool Teach-ur. Long Island City, NY: Seaburn Books, 2006.

Dorothy Borden is the much-loved daughter of Granston’s first African American lawyer. Dorothy went north for her education, but after a failed marriage she comes back home.  If her first marriage was a mistake, her second marriage is a disaster.  Joe Cephus Divine is the town’s first black police officer.  Joe is a proud but angry man.  To improve his status, Joe plans to marry an educated woman, preferably a school teacher.  Dorothy is a college professor, and she soon flees his abuse.  When Joe marries again, the shoe is on the other foot.  Johnnye Jamison, a school teacher from Pennsylvania, may feign interest in the men who pursue her, but for her marriage is just the route to a man’s money.  With drugs supplied by a lover elsewhere, Johnnye kills off her husbands.  Years later when Dorothy returns to Granston, she learns what happened to Joe and she comes to terms with her own choices and the town she grew up in.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: October 29th, 2009 under 2000-, 2006, Bowen, Sandra E., Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Sandra E. Bowen. This Day’s Madness. New York: iUniverse, 2000.

Trapeze artist Frankie is the young, orphaned star of the Doub Circus. When Frankie’s parents died they left her in the care of the circus owner and he and the other performers became her family. That Frankie is African American does not matter to them, but since she can pass as white, it is kept a secret in order to avoid controversy. On the circus’s first trip into the South, Frankie’s background is revealed and she is taken from the circus by members of the Granston, NC community. She is placed in an orphanage but after standing up for herself to a cruel authority figure, she is moved to a reform school. Eventually she is adopted, renamed Thomasena, and allowed to finish growing up outside institutions, but it is more than six years before she is free to leave Granston again.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: June 17th, 2009 under 2000, 2000-, Bowen, Sandra E., Historical, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont.
Comments: none