Cover of Out of the Night That Covers Me

Out of the Night That Covers Me

John McMillan was only eight years old when his mother died and he was ripped, without warning, from his sheltered world of books and gentility. Now on his aunt's run-down tenant farm in southern Alabama, abused by his alcoholic uncle, and completely bereft, John longs for escape—his only hope for survival. He's about to get his wish in a way no one could ever predict....A twist of fate will bring John to the Bend, a black settlement that has become a refuge for outcasts, where he'll join Tuway, a black man who helps others leave the South and find a new life in Chicago. But neither will be ready for the brutal confrontation about to change their lives, challenge the prejudice of an era, inspire the courage of a people, and most of all, touchingly reveal the secrets of one boy's heart.

Audience
young adult
Length
long · 448 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Out of the Night That Covers Me? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Out of the Night That Covers Me. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. A Place of Forgetting Shares coming of age, fiction
  2. Meely LaBauve Shares coming of age, southern lit, fiction
  3. Miss Ophelia Shares coming of age, historical fiction, fiction
  4. A Girl Named Sooner Shares coming of age, fiction, young adult

“People who read Out of the Night That Covers Me tend to reach for these next.”

  1. End of Days
  2. The Music of Razors
  3. The Crazy Man
  4. This Side of Glory

“If you want more of the same (coming of age), start with these.”

  1. The Accidental Salvation of Gracie Lee
  2. The Wiregrass
  3. Demi-Gods
  4. To Live and Drink in L.A.

“Readers describe these the same way.”

  1. Secondhand Lions
  2. Goodbye, Rudy Kazoody
  3. The last voyage of the Albatross
  4. The Undertaking of Tess

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Song of the Stork
  2. Watersmeet
  3. Summer's Shadow
  4. Days of Toil and Tears: The Child Labour Diary of Flora Rutherford