A LONG DAY IN NOVEMBER
By
An affectionate and genuinely funny novel, expanded from an adult short-story in Gaines' Bloodline (1968), about a first grader in the black quarter of a Southern sugar cane plantation. Eddie is mildly bemused by his parents' domestic crisis, but all is resolved when Daddy burns his car (the source of the strife) to the ground on the advice of a shrewd voodoo woman. If the concerns are still essentially adult ones, it's warming and refreshing fun for whoever does tune in.