THE SUMMER WE GOT SAVED

The dawn of integration challenges the Southern smalltown conventions of Bainbridge, Ala., bringing unexpected epiphanies to a cast of loosely connected characters in Devoto's gracefully written new novel. Third-generation farmer Charles Rutland, father of five, watches the family business spiral into debt; as he considers his options, a gubernatorial candidate with a pro-integration message captures his attention and roils local politics. His free-spirited sister, Eugenia, comes to visit and sneaks his two oldest daughters off to Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training camp for civil disobedience and social advocacy. There, Tab and Tina meet Dominique Calder, the biracial Yankee daughter of a divorced Civil Rights movement leader, who exposes the girls to the realities of social injustice. Devoto (My Last Days as Roy Rogers ) also chronicles the parallel story of Tab's friend Maudie May, a polio patient at Tuskegee whose Highlander education galvanizes her to start a voter-registration school. While Maudie works to earn her students' trust, Dominique brings Tab to a lunch counter sit-in in Nashville, an experience that forever changes the formerly complacent teen. Devoto's episodic, nonchronological structure creates potent narrative pull, but her evenhanded, affectionate treatment of her complex characters, each struggling to make sense of their changing world, is the novel's greatest asset. Agent, Molly Friedrich. (June)