It won’t be the book for them, but no book is ever for everyone.” I knew this was a risk there will be readers who prefer to read something that doesn’t challenge them and horrify them with its outcome, and that’s okay. “But I actually didn’t know for a long time who was going to meet the tragic end. The novel’s tragic end was inevitable, Fowler says. “Then I tried to create the most authentic characters and situations that I could.” She also had a sensitivity reader review a draft. To more effectively connect with Valerie’s and Xavier’s motivations and actions, Fowler read contemporary first-person accounts “about the experience of being black in the United States right now,” as well as books that provided historical perspective on racial discrimination and social injustice she also “pursued anything else I could think of that would give me black people’s view of what it’s like to be black in America, rather than a white person’s view of how black people feel,” she says. This sets in motion events leading to a grim denouement for the growing love between Valerie’s son, Xavier, and Brad’s daughter, Juniper. College professor Valerie Alston-Holt, who is black, eventually brings a lawsuit against her new neighbors, whose freshly dug swimming pool is slowly killing the roots of her oak tree. I don’t think I knew that was my motivation at the time I just knew that I was compelled by these characters arising in my imagination.”Ī Good Neighborhood begins with the arrival of wealthy white businessman Brad Whitman and his family to a closely knit mixed-class, mixed-race North Carolina suburb-a move that sparks class and racial tensions. The constant bad news was really dismaying to me, and I needed to respond to my dismay, to present something about how we are backsliding in this country and turn it into a story. “When I finished A Well-Behaved Woman, it was absolutely my intention to do that again, but-as I think we are all woefully aware-things in this country are not going so well. “With those books, I liked taking someone whose reputation had been maligned and giving another perspective,” Fowler says. Martin’s marks a dramatic change from her previous historical novels: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013) and A Well-Behaved Woman (2018), about Alva Smith Vanderbilt. She’s speaking of A Good Neighborhood, her new novel about an interracial romance in fictional Oak Knoll, a gentrifying North Carolina community, slated for February publication. This was meant to be a tough book,” Therese Anne Fowler says while taking a break in her South Carolina hotel room from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s annual show.
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