What do readers think of The Air Between Us by Deborah Johnson? Write your own review.

Deborah Johnson's book, "The Air Between Us", set several decades after "To Kill a Mockingbird", offers up some of the same compelling themes found in Harper Lee's classic; justice, conscience, racism and moral leadership. Dr. Reese Jackson, a hero to the entire black community and the first highly successful surgeon, and Dr. Cooper Connelly, Chief Surgeon at Doctor's Hospital and son of a white, bigoted state senator. These are two flawed heroes provide the reader access to these two very separate communities in Revere, Mississippi.

I especially enjoyed the parts of the book which offered Miss Melba's and Cooper Connelly's perspective on their small town's struggle with integration even though I found the book to be uneven. The first part moves along a little too slowly and some subplots tend to be dropped or tied up too quickly at the end. However, I would strongly recommend this book to book groups because of its compelling characters and interesting plot.

Many of the people in the novel have secrets. I was compelled to keep reading to discover motivations and histories and to learn the answers. I thought the relationship between Dr. Connelly and Miss Melba Obrenski was rather unrealistic given the racial tension and gossip network in the town, but in spite of that, I enjoyed the book.

The Air Between Us takes place in Revere, Mississippi in 1966, a town on the brink of desegregation. The looming prospect of a future with no boundaries between races helps reveal complex and often hidden relationships, and surprising secrets, among the townspeople across races and across classes. I would recommend this book for the story. But the characters did not engage me, and the whole book is written in a folksy colloquial Southern voice, which is OK coming from the characters but annoying coming from the third person narrator.

The author does a good job of describing the racial tension in the south in the 1960s which I also lived with. The end of the book is a twist which gives the reader a surprise. I didn't feel that all the characters were well developed and some relationships not quite believable. Some of the plot lines could have been more fully developed in the early part of the book, instead it seemed to quickly come together in the end. In all a good read.

The Air Between Us did not live up to it's comparison to The Secret Life of Bees. Due to the brief introduction of the many characters in the beginning of the book it did not capture my interest. I felt the plot suffered due to this lack of character development. The author herself states that the most difficult part of the book to write is the beginning because she does not know her characters well. However, she did highlight the roles of blacks and whites in the deep south on the verge of desegregation with an interesting plot twist revealed.