Gone to Green-Judy Christie

Gone to Green
Judy Christie
Abington, Aug 2009, $13.99
ISBN: 9781426700248

At the Dayton Press, reporter Lois Barker knows Ed, her beloved mentor at the paper, should have been named editor, but the central office hired a young suit who is at home in the accounting meetings and not the reporting sessions. Ed quits having “bought” his grandfather’s paper, the twice a week Green News-Item. Soon after Ed leaves Ohio for small-town Louisiana, Lois attends his funeral in Green, Louisiana.

Still grieving the loss of a man she considered a father, Lois also learns Ed thought of her as his daughter; she inherits his family’s newspaper. Not wanting to live in a rural town nor feeling experienced enough to manage a newspaper even one that publishes twice a week, Lois heads to Louisiana after a odd thought plopped into her mind that somehow she would be helped; still her plans is to sell the newspaper. Instead she finds a need in life as a gung ho progressive reformer demanding change so that the extremely depressed area can begin a Sportsman's Paradise renaissance to benefit all.

The fascination in this well written albeit unlikely inspirational tale is the changes in the heroine. She goes from independent Buckeye to unsure grieving Bayou Bengal to demanding progressive. Fans gets a look at the workings of a rural Deep South newspaper that is a tool for the “carpetbagger” to shine an ugly spotlight on the negative impact of sexism and racism, as well as the pressure on the media to acquiesce to the corporate and political bedfellows; all this inside of a solid religious element to include handling grief. Fans will relish this fine look at it takes a caring community guided by God’s loving hand to become all that a person can be.

Harriet Klausner