It’s a message worth sharing with students, who will likely see themselves represented in the book’s inclusive illustrations – students with all colors of skin students wearing hijabs, glasses, and hearing aids students with different family structures (two dads and single parents) are all represented. When he came out as gay a few years ago, he said he was “surprised by the number of conservatives who accepted me … and people who were open-minded were not as open-minded as I thought they would be.Speak Up written by Miranda Paul and illustrated by Ebony Glenn, is a picture book all about encouraging kids to use their voices to speak up! When they get your name wrong? Speak up! When people are spreading rumors that aren’t true? Speak Up! When someone is in danger? Speak up! Students are encouraged to use their voice to speak gratitude, exude kindness, and seek justice to use their voice to call people in, and call others out. His recent life experience has been rich with irony. “The characters I’m not like are the ones I worked hardest at,” he confided during a June appearance at Atlanta’s Wrecking Bar. To his credit as a true novelist, House writes with understanding, even sympathy of sorts, for the intolerance on display in the early stretches of “Southernmost.” This cannot have been an easy task. Glimmers of flourish break through the well-measured narrative: "cicada's songs shook like nervous tambourines." Florida's horizon explodes with "the red of a geranium" and, squeezing it a little, "The sky is the pink of grapefruit meat." It's not hard to imagine shavings curling up around him as he chips away at the new novel, attacking the inessential with a reasonably priced plane, leaving bumps and knobs here and there. Silas House is an award-winning author and distinguished academician he's a sincere, woodsy chap, carpenter-like. He believes in “The Everything,” which resembles the pantheistic nature worship of Thoreau and Coleridge. Justin is a smart kid who moves into the foreground as the most compelling character in “Southernmost.” Like his dad, he longs for the trees and rivers of their Tennessee shire. But Asher’s fear that Lydia’s fanaticism would have made Justin miss “the wonder of everything” proves to have been a needless concern.
Understandably, a tension surfaces between father and son: Justin feels like he’s been made a prisoner, which he has.
With Key West’s cool rains that come “from some place not of this earth,” Asher feels “as if they are in a different country.” Only they’re not, so he’s constantly looking over his shoulder for the cops.Īsher intends to hunt for Luke, although Key West’s tropical lethargy and his fugitive lifestyle create impediments to motivation. Skirting Atlanta, they flee through the silent countryside, to the Keys, where they come across an “old railroad bridge, stretching out like a concrete mystery.” He nabs Justin and heads south in his Jeep Wrangler. This agonizing turn of events becomes unbearable for Asher. Asher’s position at the church is quickly usurped by the deacon whose life Jimmy saved, and, during the inevitable divorce proceedings, in which Lydia introduces the now infamous video, the court denies Asher shared custody of his son. This is, of course, what happens in “Southernmost,” when Asher Sharp embraces Jimmy and Stephen into the fold. “The danger of sympathizing with the stranger,” she writes, “is the possibility of becoming a stranger.” In “The Origin of Others” (2017), Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison elaborates on the process of “inventing the other ” the outsider the stranger. During his sermon, overcoming his natural cowardice, Asher shouts, “We’ve got to quit this judgment!” A film of the outburst makes it to YouTube, and, subsequently, he’s either hailed as a folk-hero or reviled as a “queer-lover.” In the aftermath, when the two begin attending services, the Church of Life board demands Pastor Sharp expel the outsiders immediately. Nevertheless, at significant personal risk, Jimmy leaps into the maelstrom and rescues a Church of Life deacon and his daughter. His gay neighbors, Jimmy and Stephen, lose their house in the flood.
But to Asher, the tempest becomes a different sort of omen. Some folks in the area believe the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on same-sex marriage triggered the natural disaster. “Southernmost” opens with a torrential flood that will trigger Asher’s final break with his church’s rigid martinets.