Skunk Town Book Cover 3D

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

Is it ever too late to right a wrong? Michael C. White brilliantly captures a time in American history filled with the seething, amorphous anger of 1968. He has crafted a microcosm of the era in a small New England town, baptized in racism, tobacco fields, and families struggling to survive. This is the fertile soil for a love story between a Black girl and a red-neck boy. The complexity of White’s characters is breath taking.

— Jacqueline Sheehan

In Skunktown, Michael White delivers a page-turner that brings to vivid life America in the 1960s … White’s wit, sharp sense of detail, fast-paced dialogue, and subtle portrayal of change in the rough relationship between Lyman and his WWII veteran father pulled me deeply into this tumultuous period, and, by the end, left me breathless with wonder.

— Eugenia Kim

Suspenseful and moving, written in taut, propulsive prose, Skunktown follows Lyman, a sensitive young white boy whose friendship with a brilliant Black girl in his small New England town leads him into a murder investigation. As the truth emerges in this evocative and finely observed novel, Lyman discovers the town’s racist underbelly as well as surprising truths about the people he loves. You won't put this one down.

— Aaron Hamburger

Authors from Shakespeare to James Baldwin have explored the painful and poignant edge of love across the borders of bigotry. . .  Michael C. White’s Skunktown, the story of an intellectually gifted young black woman and a young man trying to outrun his redneck heritage, set in the New England of the Civil Rights era, makes this story new.

— Jacquelyn Mitchard
Michael C. White’s riveting novel Skunktown unfolds as a recollection of lost innocence . . . vivid and suspenseful, the pages fly by. . . a morally complex and psychologically acute exploration of the never-ending devastation wrought by racism in the land of the free.
— Valerie Martin

Skunktown

**Coming in 2027**

With echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird and Huck Finn, Skunktown tells the powerful story of twelve-year-old Lyman Polly, who must come to grips with racism while experiencing first love. Set during the turbulent summer of 1968 in a small New England town, the novel is told by the adult Lyman to his hospice nurse as he lies near death. He’s carried his “terrible secret” for over half a century and before he dies he wants to tell the true story of Maddy Skanks, a brilliant black girl who taught him about literature and jazz, about growing up Black in America, and most importantly, to trust his heart. When tragedy strikes, Lyman is first considered the prime suspect of the crime, but soon he takes it upon himself to find the real killer and places himself at the center of a deadly game.