Valerie is black her husband and Xavier’s dad, who died when Xavier was a toddler, was white. Most dismayed by the Whitmans’ presence is next-door neighbor Valerie Alston-Holt, an ecology and forestry professor and mom to high school senior Xavier. Oak Knoll’s residents are proud of their trees, their progressive outlook and the neighborhood’s multiracial makeup. But that’s exactly what unfolds in Therese Anne Fowler’s A Good Neighborhood, whose first paragraph hints at what’s coming: “Later this summer when the funeral takes place, the media will speculate boldly on who’s to blame.”Ī loose reworking of Romeo and Juliet, A Good Neighborhood opens on the day the Whitmans, a white family, move into the overly fancy house they’ve built in Oak Knoll, the “good neighborhood” of the title. A contemporary North Carolina suburb might seem an unlikely setting for Shakespearean tragedy.
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