Fiction

Blue Hole Back Home

“…beautifully crafted.”
–Leif Enger,  bestselling author of Peace Like a River

Winner, 2009 Christy Award for First Novel

Chosen as the 2009 Common Book for Baylor University

Featured at readerscircle.org

Watch a television interview with the author.

When a fifteen-year-old Sri Lankan girl moves to the all-white Pisgah Ridge, Shelby Lenoir Maynard invites her to join Shelby and her brother and her brother’s friends for a swim at the Blue Hole-less in a gesture of bold social reform than because it is simply too hot to think straight. Exotic, mysterious and fiercely independent, the new girl throws the entire town into turmoil. When two different members of The Pack, as Shelby and her brother and her brother’s friends call themselves, begin exhibiting interest in the new girl and a third hints he may be conspiring with the local Klan, the Pack itself threatens to splinter. Throughout the summer, as the town’s hostilities steadily increase along with the heat, the Blue Hole remains the teenagers’ only place of real peace-and even that has its limits. Eventually, the tensions outside the Blue Hole erupt in betrayals, cross-burnings and a deadly explosion. Ultimately, though, Blue Hole Back Home is a story not only of the devastating effects of racial hatred and cowardice, but more centrally, a celebration of courage, confrontation, mercy and healing.

Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel

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And now in

LARGE PRINT,

published by Thorndike Press in 2010.

[AMAZON LINK]




  • Some Favorite Quotes on the Writing Life:

    "People without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal."
    --Flannery O’Connor

    "You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
    --Jack London

    "Writing has saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence." --Alice Walker

    "You must be prepared to work always without applause."
    --Ernest Hemingway

    "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
    --Samuel Beckett

    "The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common."
    --Ralph Waldo Emerson

    "You keep putting one blessed word after another, just as you hear them, as they come to you."
    --Anne Lamott

    "Sing to God a new song."
    --Psalm 33:3

BLUE HOLE BACK HOME Chosen as Common Book, Classroom Text and Summer Reading

Blue Hole Back Home is being used in universities, high schools and community settings to spur discussions on American culture, history, and diversity. The novel was selected, for example, as the 2009 Common Book for Baylor University's first-year students, who met in small groups to consider issues of courage, reconciliation and social transformation. Want to know more about how Blue Hole Back Home might function in your academic, book club or community setting? You can see a television interview about how one high school is using the novel, watch a brief trailer with audio from the first chapter, and read more information under the Books-Fiction pull down menu above. You'll also find entries related to Blue Hole--including hearing the music behind the book-- on Joy's blog at bottom right of this page.

Intrigued with the Underground Railroad or the Great Hunger of Ireland or Pre-Civil War Boston and Charleston? STEAL AWAY is a Novel-in-Progress

On a sultry Charleston, South Carolina, morning in 1822, two boys, one a slave and the other the son of a white prostitute, witness the hanging of slave revolt leader Denmark Vesey. The consequences of that day, brutal and far-reaching, set the tumultuous course for their adult lives. The toughest thing about writing Steal Away? The actual history is too incredible. Joy perpetually feels inadequate to the task: Slaves mailing themselves to the North, or escaping, disguised, in plain view. Secret networks of abolitionists. Slaveholders riven with guilt. Cities teeming with new ideas, inventions, excitement--and a world of new problems. Ordinary people staking their lives on what they believe America is--or ought to become.

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