I avoided this book for so long - the cover made me vaguely think that this was going to be some feel-good tale of the not-so-old South, which turned me off. Then my book club chose it, and I kept avoiding it, until I needed to read it *immediately* or be publicly shamed for not reading it. So I started it - then stayed up until five in the morning to finish it, because I absolutely couldn't put it down. The writing was wonderful and the characters were perfectly drawn. I thought the choice to tell it in first-person from three women's viewpoints was interesting and v. challenging, but it really worked. The book deserves all the acclaim it got, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the civil rights movement (which I'm woefully ignorant of, since my school's history classes tended to start at the Pilgrims and end somewhere around WWI every. single. year.)