A new college basketball season is just around the corner, so it’s an appropriate time to add this novel to your reading list.

Mickey Barton was the captain of his high school basketball team–a team that won the state championship and a national invitational tournament.  That should make him a hot prospect for the premier basketball colleges in his state.  But Mickey has a problem–he is only 5′ 6″.  The big time schools rebuff him, and his best friend and teammate 6′ 10″ Hub Duncan trades his friendship with Mickey for a chance to play for an elite coach.  Mickey, whose dad is dead, needs a scholarship to attend college.  Luckily, his high school coach becomes the basketball coach at Greyling Tech, the perennial cellar dweller in the conference.  Mickey joins Coach Royce there.  Despite the ragtag nature of the team and bad behavior by the coach’s son, they go on to glory.

Mickey’s college, Grayling Tech, is thought to be Wake Forest, but I could not identify any of the schools in the conference.

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

Posted: October 19th, 2009 under 1950-1959, 1952, Children & Young Adults, Leonard, Burgess.
Comments: none

Both Royal Governor William Tryon and the Regulator insurrection are well known to students of North Carolina history.  In this novel, Inglis Fletcher retells these familiar stories through the actions of Hillary Caswell.  Caswell is a Marylander by birth, new to North Carolina, but wealthy and well connected (his cousin Richard is the speaker of the North Carolina Assembly).  As the novel opens, Caswell is making plans to go to New Bern where he will join Governor Tryon’s administration.  Although the complaints of his kinsmen and the allure of Cecelia Chapman should have kept him in Tyrrell County, Caswell goes on to New Bern and from there into the fray of late colonial unrest and the fateful Battle of Alamance.  As with most of Fletcher’s novels, historical figures like Tryon, Harmon Husband, and Edmund Fanning are integral to the story.

This is the ninth novel in Fletcher’s Carolina Series.

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

Posted: August 26th, 2009 under 1950-1959, 1957, Coast, Fletcher, Inglis, Historical, Novels in Series, Piedmont.
Comments: none

In this novel, set as the Revolutionary War is drawing to a close, follows Ross Pembroke, a patriot who has just escaped from the British in Charleston.  Pembroke began his service in the North, but the war has taken him south and for most of the novel he shuttles between the bases of patriot officers in North and South Carolina. He also finds time to pursue and protect the tempestuous Dorande van Kortenaer, a beautiful refugee from the island of St. Eusebius.  Historical figures such as Nathanael Greene and Francis Marion figure in the narrative, but this novel is very much in the tradition of the historical romance.

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

Posted: August 26th, 2009 under 1950-1959, 1952, Coast, Historical, Lancaster, Bruce, Romance/Relationship.
Comments: none

This is generally considered a roman a clef of the vicious 1950 Democratic primary campaign for the United States Senate seat held by Frank Porter Graham.  The action is centered in the state capital where Bill Tucker, a political operative, works maniacally to tip the election away from the moderate candidate.  Tucker’s candidate, Colonel Harvey Pollock, lost the initial primary to the incumbent despite possessing the advantages of a good family name, a wealthy, attractive wife, and a substantial campaign chest.  Now it’s the run-off primary and Tucker wants to pull out all the stops to win. When the book opens, Tucker is no Boy Scout, but as he masters dirty dealing and race baiting in his pursuit of victory, he goes past the point of no return. Tucker’s man wins the election, but Tucker has lost his moral compass, the woman he loves, and his future.

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

Posted: August 8th, 2009 under 1950-1959, 1953, Historical, Piedmont, Wake, Wicker, Tom.
Comments: none

Just outside of Marion (a town that might be Lumberton, Hamlet, or Rockingham), a farmer is murdered.  A young African American man is accused of the killing, but newspaperman Sandy Martin thinks he is innocent. The murder itself is gruesome, but what Martin uncovers during his investigation is worse: political corruption, personal betrayals, witchcraft. This is a dark picture of a small southern town in the last days of one party rule and Jim Crow.

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

Posted: August 1st, 2009 under 1950-1959, 1957, Coastal Plain, Mystery, Wicker, Tom.
Comments: none