Fireflies in December by Jennifer Erin Valent

Troubles continue to overwhelm the family as they stand for what they believe is right: knowing that God created all men/nationalities/races equally.įireflies in December is eye-opening, haunting, suspenseful and just plain moving. The Ku Klux Klan becomes involved and things get a little dicey and frightening. Folks aren’t real pleased when dark Gemma moves in with the Lassiter family. Jessilyn and Gemma are close friends, having grown up together, although society does make an attempt to segregate them from each other. Lassiter to care for his younger daughter, Gemma, and Mr. Jessilyn’s daddy was close friends with one of his workers who died in a fire as a result of a lightening storm. The Lassiter family employed colored folk (btw, that’s how they are referred to in the story and I’m just using the same phrase). hard hearts have long memories.” (page 148) I think the book can be best summed up by one of its own sentences: This book is a story of race, yes, but it goes beyond that to address issues of the heart. Her father had the “misfortune” of viewing the colored folk as equals whereas the majority of the population in their small town did not agree.

The main protagonist in Fireflies in December is thirteen year old Jessilyn Lassiter who lives with her family on a farm in southern Virginia in the year 1932. I could have handled another few hundred pages myself. The only reason that the end was regrettable, by the way, was because it was just that – the end. I was gripped from page one and followed it faithfully through to the regrettable end. I quickly discovered that there would be no skimming of this book. In all honesty, I was planning to skim the story in order to do this review because I was getting a bit behind in my reading load.

Fireflies in December by Jennifer Erin Valent