Blog Tour: In The Neighborhood of True by Susan Kaplan Carlton (Guest Post + Giveaway!)

Item: In the Neighborhood of True
Author: Kaity

Posted April 9, 2019 by Kaity in Book Tours, Giveaways, Guest Post / 0 Comments

Happy Tuesday and welcome to my stop on the In The Neighborhood of True blog tour!!

In the Neighborhood of True by Susan Kaplan Carlton
Published on April 9, 2019 by Algonquin Young Readers
Genres: YA, Historical Fiction
Pages: 320
Add to Goodreads

A powerful story of love, identity, and the price of fitting in or speaking out.

After her father’s death, Ruth Robb and her family transplant themselves in the summer of 1958 from New York City to Atlanta—the land of debutantes, sweet tea, and the Ku Klux Klan. In her new hometown, Ruth quickly figures out she can be Jewish or she can be popular, but she can’t be both. Eager to fit in with the blond girls in the “pastel posse,” Ruth decides to hide her religion. Before she knows it, she is falling for the handsome and charming Davis and sipping Cokes with him and his friends at the all-white, all-Christian Club.

Does it matter that Ruth’s mother makes her attend services at the local synagogue every week? Not as long as nobody outside her family knows the truth. At temple Ruth meets Max, who is serious and intense about the fight for social justice, and now she is caught between two worlds, two religions, and two boys. But when a violent hate crime brings the different parts of Ruth’s life into sharp conflict, she will have to choose between all she’s come to love about her new life and standing up for what she believes.

Guest Post

What inspired you to write this book?

The roots of the story are deeply personal. Our family had just moved to Atlanta and joined a synagogue where we were welcomed with a hearty “Shabbat shalom, y’all!.” We were still new to town when our youngest daughter announced she’d just learned that the classroom she spent every Sunday morning in had been the site of a bombing years before.

That stayed with me—the idea that the walls that held these kids had once been blown apart. In the Neighborhood of True is a response to that bombing in 1958, retribution for the rabbi’s involvement in civil rights. The book is horrifying timely in a way I never could have imagined. You can draw a line from Atlanta in 1958 ….to Charlottesville in 2017….to Pittsburgh in 2018.

All that hate, all that violence, all that “good people on both sides,” is sometimes overwhelming. But I had these characters and their truths. I had their voices and I had their hope.

About the Author

Susan Kaplan Carlton, a longtime magazine writer, currently teaches writing at Boston University. She lived for a time with her family in Atlanta, where her daughters learned the fine points of etiquette from a little pink book and learned the power of social justice from their synagogue. Carlton’s writing has appeared in Self, Elle, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, Parents, and elsewhere. She is the author of the young adult novels Love & Haight, which was named a Best Book for Young Adults by YALSA and a Best Book by the Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street Books, and Lobsterland.