Overview

A coming-of-age novel exploring issues of race, love, and loss in the contemporary American South. In a town with a dark past, two classmates face relentless opposition as they seek out the truth and discover one another in the process. After spending the summer at a photography intensive in New York City, seventeen-year-old Kackie Aiken, a feisty redhead from a blueblood Southern family, believes she's outgrown the small, historic town of Mandeville, South Carolina, of which her ancestor is a founding father. But when she returns home for her senior year at University High School and is promptly partnered for a project about the Civil Rights Movement with Walt Singletary, a new Black student at the primarily white prep school, Kackie is forced to confront her family's dark history amidst intensifying hostility in a class led by the eccentric Dr. Leavitt. Set against the backdrop of historic Mandeville's tricentennial celebration-and under the menacing gaze of Mayor Tommy Cooper, whose influence shadows the school and the town-Kackie and Walt face relentless opposition as they seek out the truth and find one another in the process. Old loyalties strain. New affections complicate. And the deeper Kackie digs, the more she discovers her family's complicity in the systemic evils that bind their community. Can Kackie and Walt resurrect the ghosts of the past without being destroyed by them? Nobody Wants to Remember is a soulful and heartbreaking coming-of-age story about confession and repentance, even when they cost you what you most hold dear; and about how, especially for Kackie and Walt, the truth may not always set you free.

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Courtney McLean Thompson is someone you've never heard of-she's spent the last decade living in a South Carolina town you won't find on a map and she's befriended a community of people who aren't in the public record. She's listened to them, learned from them, grieved and hoped with them. And now, she's telling their story in her debut novel Nobody Wants to Remember.As a white woman who grew up in the low country of South Carolina and has spent her adulthood in Charlottesville, Virginia, Courtney has a lived, bodily knowledge of racially-animated events that have shaped our current moment in history. She understands the blindspots of white culture and is deeply frustrated by the ways in which they are perpetuated generationally, buried in fantasies of white innocence and mythologized through white savior stories. It is out of this understanding that she, over a decade ago, began to curate the world of Nobody Wants to Remember and the characters who brought it to life. This work has been meticulously crafted by a desire to serve not only white Americans who need help seeing the world more honestly, but also their African American neighbors who are weary of the burden of educating white people about their own past and how they have been formed by it.When she isn't writing, Courtney can be found raising four real characters and daydreaming about her fictional ones. She holds a BA in Journalism (with a focus in African American Studies) and an MA in Theology.

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