Product Description
"There is nothing small about Childress's fine novel. It's big in all the ways that matter - big in daring, big in insight, and big-hearted. Really, really big-hearted." -New Orleans Times-Picayune

This exuberantly acclaimed novel by the author of the bestselling Crazy in Alabama tells an uproarious and moving story about family, best friends, first love, and surviving the scariest years of your life.

You need only one best friend, Daniel Musgrove figures, to make it through high school alive. After his family moves to Mississippi just before his junior year, Daniel finds fellow outsider Tim Cousins. The two become inseparable, sharing a fascination with ridicule, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, and Arnita Beecham, the most bewitching girl at Minor High. But soon things go terribly wrong. The friends commit a small crime that grows larger and larger, and threatens to engulf the whole town. Arnita, the first black prom queen in the history of the school, is injured and wakes up a different person. And Daniel, Tim, and their families are swept up in a shocking chain of events.

"Wise, riveting, hilarious, painful, gentle, and ferocious, One Mississippi is a wonderful read." -Anne Lamott

"A Tilt-a-Whirl that flings the reader from comedy to calamity. . . . Childress is a fabulist in the manner of John Irving." -Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"By turns rollicking and troubling, as provocative as it is droll, One Mississippi is about as easy to resist as a riptide. This critic's advice is to go with its powerful flow." -RaleighNews & Observer

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 44 reviews)

Funny, Yet Filled with Horror

I would love to be able to whole-heartedly recommend "One Mississippi", but I just can't. This book starts as a hilarious coming-of-age novel set in the 1970s and then it turns into some kind of horror story.

The 16-year-old protagonist, Daniel Musgrove, is forced to move from Indiana to a town outside of Jackson, Mississippi, which is a situation ripe for some comedic culture shock.

"One Mississippi" covers some ground on race relations in addition to the usual challenges of moving to a new community and making your way through high school. And then it really gets ugly.

"One Mississippi" reminded me of the movie "Meet the Parents." Quite often funny things were happening, but then something horribly uncomfortable would happen to the protagonist and you would think it couldn't get any worse. And then, it did get worse and yet more uncomfortable.

I loved and hated "One Mississippi."

September 10, 2008

fun read

I pick this book up in Target's because of the title/cover and boy am I glad I did. This was a FUN read!
August 17, 2008

Wanted to Love It

I wanted to LOVE this book. It had all the elements in place for a book that I should love. But in the end I finished with a strong sense of like. This book, for me, was the boy that your mama wanted you to date because he was so perfect for you and the fit on paper was excellent, but in the end you had to be "just friends" because the chemistry was missing. I can't say how others will view this book, but for me the chemistry just wasn't there.

But when I say the elements were in place, they really are there. You have the loner, the outcast, the bully, the crazy family; add to the mix the generally apathetic high school administration, a football crazed community, one teacher who "gets" it, and many closets full of skeletons. The book should have been dark and outrageously funny. It should have rivaled "Gods in Alabama", which had most of the same elements in play, as a dark, violent comedy. But for me, it didn't. It was a good story, the book was well written, the characterizations were good. But it lacked that certain something that made reading compelling. In the end, this is a well written, well conceived book with good execution that has has all the excitement and intrigue of a gay prom date.
June 26, 2008

Owes a debt to Richard Bradford

Childress has uncannily captured a great deal of the wit and tenderness of Richard Bradford's great novel Red Sky at Morning (my all-time favorite; read it if you haven't), centering on the cultural/geographic displacement of a teenage boy and his developing bond with another youth--one also on the social fringe, but for different reasons. Like Bradford's novel, this one engages the topics of war, marital frailty, economic disparity, the labyrinth pecking order of high school, and most notably, interracial dating. Childress' book is a darker one, as he allows his characters to explore more deeply into dark corners of human suffering. There is great sadness here, and the reader will grieve loss, yet you will sense the unwavering fondness the author feels for his players.
April 07, 2008

Interesting, but......

While I enjoyed the references to 70's culture, which brought back lots of memories, I just don't see this as a humorous book at all. (the cover even featured a quote from, of all people, Stephen King, that it was the funniest novel he'd read in ten years--guess I should have considered the source) On the contrary, it was very dark, from beginning to end. Many of the characters were downright disturbing, from Daniel's father to Arnita, to Tim, as well as some of the minor characters. It is difficult to elaborate on these comments without giving away key events, but Daniel's father was a most unsympathetic character, the effects of Arnita's injury are far from humorous, her mother is strange and disturbing, the "Christ" play was too ridiculous to be believed, and Tim was one creepy character from the start. One had to wonder over and over why Daniel would want to be friends with him. The ending was really bizarre, even though there was plenty of foreshadowing, so not that much of a surprise. It just didn't seem to fit. However, I am most puzzled by the depiction of this story as "humorous," "uproarious," "hilarious," or "rollicking." Disturbing, dark, and troubling are more accurate.
March 20, 2008

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