Stopping for Green Lights

This book was a real surprise. It should be a film. I was delighted by the characters and the way in which a very specific time was brought to life. People tend to think of racism as being a "southern problem," but it's not. Racism was/is alive and well in the north, as well. Alyce Miller examines the complexities of racial divisions and racial fusions in a small Midwestern college town, and the impact on both its white and black residents. It's not at all a feel-good book, and there is a lot of uneasiness in it, as there should be. In fact, it is likely to make a lot of readers uncomfortable since it may hit home too hard. Miller is a terrific writer whose first collection of stories, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award, also deals with race in various ways. She keeps things complicated, and addresses with both humor and sadness the confused desires and conflicts of characters whose lives are forever marked by various permutations on racism.

I really enjoyed this book. I felt like I was there with Tis

Stopping For Green Lights is the eye-opening tale of a girl who desperately wants to be accepted by her African American friends in the 1960s. It's interesting & comforting to see how Tish views the world. Not as a white person, but as a black person at heart trapped in a white person's body. This is definitely one of my favorites!

This was a thoughtful, richly textured book that will make people stop and think, and rethink. It's right up there on my list with books like Housekeeping.

"Stopping for Green Lights" captures the experience of a generation of American youth. Miller's protagonist, Tish, is a young white woman who is trying desperately to "do the right thing" in a world of contradictions and hypocrisy. Her coming of age is fraught with the larger political issues that surround her. Miller forces us to look at the fact that the American experience is vastly different for blacks than it is for whites. By ignoring it, as Tish's parents do, and as we the reader tend to, we ensure that the situation endures unchanged.