USM alum publishes book

In The Healing, an old woman tells a hurting young girl her story of growing up as a slave child on a Mississippi plantation. When Granada was only a baby, mistress Amanda Satterfield, stricken with grief over the loss of her own daughter, took her from her mother and brought her to live inside the plantation home.

There Granada lives a life quite removed from that of other slave-born children. The mentally disturbed mistress takes the bizarre notion to dress her in her dead daughter's beautiful clothes. This gives Granada a false sense of privilege and grandeur.

However, when an inexplicable plague hits the plantation, Granada is sent to live with Polly Shine, a slave said to have the gift of healing. She senses in Granada a gift that the young girl cannot yet see herself.

Thus begins The Healing, a work not only about the healing of the body, but of the spirit, the mind, the heart, the soul and the past.

Written by Mississippi native Jonathan Odell, this story eclipses in depth and resonance other recent works that attempted to explore the themes of race and womanhood. While it is sure to draw comparisons to Kathryn Stockett's The Help, The Healing is far more nuanced in its approach.

Before writing The Healing, Odell spent time traveling, researching and interviewing people in order to gain greater insight into the people and the time he sought to write about. It shows.

Readers will often forget that this book was not written by a woman with firsthand knowledge of life on a slave plantation in the years leading up to the Civil War. In fact, Odell is a white man. The Healing proves his unique ability to draw from the experience of others and from that breathe into life characters seem all at once tangible, believable and historical.

While reading my advance copy of The Healing, I did not feel as if I was reading an unpublished work for the purpose of review; I felt like I was reading a literary classic that was surely already sitting on the shelf of every serious student of Southern fiction. Someday, I predict it will be.

The Healing goes on sale Feb. 21. Odell will be visiting Southern Miss, his alma mater, on March 6 for a campus-wide honors symposium and reception.