Prisoners of War

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It is 1943, and the war has come home to Loring, Mississippi. As German POWs labor in the cotton fields, the local draft board sends boys into uniform, and families receive flags and condolences. But for Dan Timms, just shy of 18, the war is his ticket out of town and away from the ghosts that haunt him. As he peddles goods from a rolling store for his profiteer uncle, Dan tries to understand his friend L.C., a young man who, on account of his skin, feels like a prisoner himself. But one day, Dan spots Marty Stark who has just returned from Italy, mysteriously reassigned to guard the POWs he was once trained to kill. As Dan soon learns, Marty’s war is far from over and threatens to erupt again. From the Trade Paperback edition.From Publishers WeeklySet in the same small Mississippi town as Yarbrough's critically acclaimed Visible Spirits, this complex WWII-era novel explores questions of morality and social inequity in the rural South when a group of German POWs are quartered at a local camp and sent to work as day laborers on nearby farms. The novel opens with the uncomfortable friendship between young Dan Timms, who drives one of his enterprising Uncle Alvin's "rolling stores" (old school buses boasting all the necessities of country life: sodas, coal-oil lamps, radios), and L.C. Stevens, the black employee who drives the other. While L.C. vainly struggles to make his work partner see the "parallel universe" in which black Americans are trapped, Dan yearns to join the army and escape the fresh memory of his father's recent suicide and his suspicions about his mother's past. But Dan's friend Marty Stark shows him another side of war when he returns damaged and changed from the German theater and is reassigned to help guard the town's German POWs. The story shifts subtly when a Polish prisoner informs Dan of an escape planned by several other prisoners, setting in motion a chain of events that eventually brings Marty's troubled war memories to the surface. Meanwhile, L.C. suffers a beating by an older, powerful white man who, after losing his own son in the war, uses his influence to ensure that the young black man is drafted. The multiple subplots slow the novel's pace, but Yarbrough's warm, measured voice, clean prose and rich character studies make this an unusually tender and accomplished study of the reverberations of war on the home front.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistOnce again, Yarbrough (Visible Spirits, 2001) turns in a gripping, character-driven novel that tackles important issues of race relations, patriotism, and the effects of war. The story takes place in a rural Mississippi community in 1943. Dan Timms is a few weeks shy of enlisting in the military, and he can hardly wait to shake the small-town dust off his shoes. For him the war is a reason to escape the knowledge of his mother's infidelity and the discovery of his father's suicide. Not even the experiences of his best friend, who has returned from the war with a damaged psyche, can dissuade him. Nor can his war-profiteering uncle, for whom Dan works part-time. Also working for Alvin Timms is L. C., a young African American who has no intention of serving in the military and for whom the racial gap is wider than the Grand Canyon. The novel is far from weak on plot, but Yarbrough's characters are so powerfully three-dimensional that the story's tension flows from many directions. And it never lets up. Frank CasoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved