num_pages: 432
description: When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she's assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the South represents. Finding inner strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her adult students for their showdown with the county registrar. All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer.
language: English
title: Freshwater Road
titlecomplete: Freshwater Road
genres: Fiction, African American, Southern, Realistic Fiction, Young Adult, Historical, Race, Historical Fiction, Adult, Novels
ratings_count: 1195
places: Mississippi
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
category: Debut Fiction
publisher: Gallery