Sources of Light

Synopsis

1962. Jackson, Mississippi. A broken camera lay in the dried out pine needles of the wood. Smantha finds it and thinks nothing of it. She'd never thought that it could possibly belong to someone so close to her heart.
 
Sam and her mother view the world through a very different lens than the Southern folks around them. People like the McLemores fear that Sam, her mother, and her mother's very close friend, Perry, are in the South to "Agitate" and to sake up the dividing lines between black and white and blur it all to grey.

In examining the natue of segregation and its boundaries, Sam navigates quite a few difficult relationships--romantic, familial, uncomfortable, painful, and cheerful--to frame the truth that she herself can envision in such a tumultuous time. And when Perry gives Sam her first camera, the lens acts as another eye for her to focus with--she may documnet the shadows of hatred in order to bring forth the brilliance of hope.

In her fourth novel with Houghton Mifflin, Margaret McMullan sheds a memoir-esque light upon one of the richest epochs in America's twentieth century. McMullan captures a coming-of-age stroy that weaves throughout the poetics that place themselves at the essence of being human: light and dark, joy and sorrow, love and hate, desire and temperance, life and death.