To Love Mercy

The worlds of a black family and a Jewish family unexpectedly collide in 1948 Chicago after a bizarre accident leaves a black boy injured. Sass Trimble, the black boy from Bronzeville, "Chicago's Harlem," and Steve Feinberg, a Jewish boy from well-to-do Hyde Park, get on a bus together and get lost in the city. Once free from the neighborhoods that have defined them, the boys explore the city together with enthusiasm, while their families tear each other apart in fear.Steve and Sass spend a day and a night getting more and more lost, and along the way they also lose their inclination to go home. At last the boys discover Riverview -- then "The world's largest amusement park" -- where racism catches up to them in the cruelest possible way.The boys' newfound freedom contrasts sharply with the constraints of the novel's adult characters, both black and white, whose fear makes them as ready to attack one another as they are to expect attacks. The boys' families know that Steve and Sass are together, a fact that upsets them as much as the fact that the boys are lost. Racial tensions reach the boiling point when the families meet in a storefront church in Bronzeville, and personal choices are weighed with a shattering clarity against the pressures of the city.