Whitney Scott, BookList
Cultivate random acts of kindness, an old saying goes, but
Siporin depicts a culture with the opposite attitude, one fueled
by the increasingly conservative and restrictive, judgmental and
punitive; its extreme epitomized by neo-Nazi skinhead terrorists
bent on destruction of everything not straight or Aryan. As a
hate trial proceeds in Portland, Oregon, a strange web of coincidences
brings together a black journalist on an investigative mission,
a Jewish teacher whose sister-in-law is brutally raped, a group
of young skinheads with a wildly unbalanced boy called Billy the
Kid at its center, and a small lesbian commune in the rural outskirts
of the polarized city. "Hatred in the name of God,"
a lesbian character calls it as she summarizes the growing influence
of a group calling itself Citizens for Family Values. Siporin,
an award-winning Oregon journalist, uses information he collected
while reporting on local hate crimes as the basis for this exploration
of bigotry and its political implications, a well-paced first
novel of social import that will leave readers anticipating his
next. --Whitney Scott