In the Family Way

As English department chair of one of the top high schools in the Atlanta area, I make it my business to keep up with the best of new fiction each year. Of the many wonderful books I read in 1999, "In the Family Way" is at the top of my list. I have rarely read a novel that evokes a Southern childhood so well. Hays' writing is exquisite; his spare prose pulls you in and won't let go. You laugh, you cry, and when it's over you really, really wish for more. Jeru Lamb is a boy you might have known, and Jeru's Greenville is a place that you may very well recognize. I highly recommend "In the Family Way!"

Jeru's cogent and heart-felt story-telling is one of the best first-person narratives I've ever read, on a par with "Gatsby" and in the same ballpark with "Catcher in the Rye." This is a superb story of a perilous, traumatic event in a young boy's life and the intensely profound impact that event has on the boy and the people close to him. The writing is excellent, sparing of needless detail but with exactly the right mix of time and place to provide an enormously emotional wallop. This book is a treasure and proves that Tommy Hays' potential as a writer is boundless.

This little book was such a delight to read. The dialogue rang true in the voice of the narrator, Jeru Lamb, a ten year old boy. The book focuses on the family's ability to survive and thrive after a devastating loss has occurred. I look forward to Tommy Hays' future books.

It seems there are too few writers today who can tell a story that is engaging and well written. Tommy Hays is one of these few. Without resorting to sensationalism or sentimentality, he gives us a very charming, sometimes poignant story, masterfully told. Jeru's inner dialogue, as he tries to make sense of the disturbing events taking place around him, is as wise as it is innocent. Bravo!

This book is not only a refreshing, beautifully written, realistic, and entirely credible account of a boy's struggle to make sense of the world and his own family, but it is also the reassurance that there is at least one modern writer who can truly capture a story and an entire life within the pages of a novel, a writer who deserves to be remembered just as his words will be remembered forever. Hays has breathed life into a family and an entire 1960s Southern town, making this created world as real as our own lives today. Not only is this story heartwarming and the characters people I wish I knew, but the writing itself is purely magic in words, a poetic portrayal in the hard-to-reach area between literary snobbery and lackluster simplicity. This writing will produce both laughter and tears, and will leave the reader changed, somehow finding a piece of himself in little Jeru, and realizing that a piece of Jeru will remain in his own heart long after the book has been placed back on the shelf.