Take the Long Way Home

In the bracing if aimless latest from Alers (Along the Shore), a Black woman looks back on her origins in the Jim Crow South and the new lives she’s built in New York City and Italy. At age 12 in 1952, Claudia Patterson avoids the racist white residents of her sharply segregated Mississippi town, a situation Alers paints in fraught terms, such as an episode involving Claudia rescuing a white boy who was beaten by his father. A later section set in the late 1950s and early ’60s portrays Claudia’s courtship and marriage to Robert Moore, a Black attorney working to support the civil rights movement. After Robert dies in 1963 under suspicious circumstances, Claudia begins a new life in New York City, where in 1968 she meets Ashley Booth, a man who works on Wall Street and invites her into Black upper-class society. A final section, beginning later that year, involves Claudia’s further reinvention in Italy. Although Alers ably portrays her characters’ enthusiasm and sacrifices for the cause of racial equality, this much material would have benefited from a unifying plot. Readers will lose the thread. (Nov.)