“Half-Truths” by Carol Baldwin

Introduction:

Carol Baldwin spent eighteen years researching and writing her latest book, Half-Truths (Monarch Educational Services 2025). I can’t even imagine. I spent about six years on my first novel, and that felt like an eternity. But Baldwin seems to love research, an important quality for someone taking on a historical fiction novel set at the beginning of the civil rights movement in the South. Although Half-Truths is perfect for teenage girls or young adults, readers of all ages will embrace its engaging story and characters. (By the way, I can see this book in the hands of middle-graders, too. I think its target audience might be teenage girls. On Amazon it’s recommended for ages 13-18, and that seems about right to me. My four granddaughters—all mixed-race girls—are 10, 13, 15, and 16 this summer.) One more personal note before I move on . . . Baldwin sets the book mostly in 1951, which happens to be the year I was born in Jackson, Mississippi. But I was fifteen years younger than her heroines, Katie and Lillie, so it took me many years to learn about and understand what was happening in the civil rights scene in my home in the South.

Review:

So how did a Jewish girl from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, end up setting her story in Charlotte, North Carolina? Turns out after she was widowed at age 27, Baldwin became a Southerner by a second marriage and moved to Charlotte. By her own words, she is inspired by “books that present tapestries of relationships, show the interior live of the characters, and reveal the difficult choices they make.” She has accomplished all three of these in Half-Truths.

First, the interior lives of the characters, and their relationships. Anna Katherine Dinsmore (Kate/Katie) is friends with Mildred, who is Black, and her father works on Kate’s father’s tobacco farm in Tabor City, North Carolina. Kate’s father Ben is sympathetic to Blacks and lets them shop in his store. Her maternal grandfather Lester is racist. When the KKK come to town for a parade in 1950, Horace Carter, editor of the Tabor City Tribune, does investigative reporting and ends up winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Katie, who is 15, wants to be a journalist but is afraid of the dangers of writing the whole truth. She shows Mr. Carter her writing and he publishes it as an editorial and encourages her to go to college. She knows her parents can’t afford college, but her paternal grandparents are wealthy and live in Charlotte. She goes to live with them, hoping they will help pay for her to attend Queen’s College when she graduates from high school.

Leaving Mildred behind was hard, but at her Charlotte grandparents’ home she makes a new friend, Lillian, who works as a maid at their mansion. Of course Kate has friends at school, but they are snobby and make fun of her because she’s from the country. Her grandmother tries to gentrify her with clothes and makeup and help with elocution. She grooms her for society, and although she can be mean, she feels she’s doing what’s best for Kate. Lillian and Kate make a discovery in the attic that rocks their worlds, and will soon also have a huge impact on both of their grandparents. The reader gets allusions to this mystery early on, but Baldwin builds on it as Lillian and Kate’s relationship grows, along with other important characters like Lillian’s grandmother “Auntie Esther,” and later the editor at the Charlotte Observer, where Kate eventually gets a job.

Horace Carter

There are fascinating cameos by people like a leader in the League of Women’s Voters, a fictional character based off the Grand Dragon of the KKK, and Kelly Alexander, Sr., the head of the Charlotte chapter of the NAACP, as well as Horace Carter, whom I’ve already mentioned.  I love the way Baldwin blends facts with fiction, as I did in my own novels. (In John and Mary Margaret, for example, Eudora Welty and Martin Luther King make cameo appearances.)

Teenage girls will especially enjoy the chapters where Katie is honored with a society party at her grandparents’ home in Charlotte, and scenes at her high school, where she struggles to find the courage to speak whole (rather than half) truths, which doesn’t make her very popular. Readers will also enjoy many of the chapter titles, which are often quotes from pop culture at the time, like this one from Chapter 12: “Catch Your Dream Boat Guy with the latest Bobbie Brooks fall fashions,” from Seventeen Magazine, September, 1950.

Katie shows courage as she explores a Black neighborhood (where Lillian’s family lives) to go with Lillian to get lime sulfur from Lillian’s father’s mortuary, to treat Katie’s pet goat, Josie. They overhear arguments happening in the NAACP meeting going on upstairs, about the city moving the Black people buried there so they can build new houses for Whites. They also overhear Lillian’s mother arguing in favor of integrating the schools. Katie takes notes, which are shared throughout the book, and inspire her to continue her journey to become a newspaper reporter. She writes an article for her junior high school newspaper, The Broadcaster, “Negro Grave Removal.” She ends up quitting the paper, which only wants her to write a gossip column. Remember that making difficult choices was one of the things that inspired Baldwin to create brave characters like Kate!

Blue Willow china

I’ll close with a fun side-story that Baldwin used for added texture in the book. It’s about Blue Willow—the china pattern and the book. The book, by Doris Gates, published in 1940, was considered an early “realistic” book for children, in that it showed some difficult struggles and issues of class during the Great Depression. The title comes from the china pattern that was important to the story. A decade later, it resurfaces in the lives of Katie, Lillian, and their grandmothers. No spoiler alert here. I’ll leave the rest of that mystery to the readers of Half-Truths!

Baldwin closes her book in an interesting way. Just as I was wanting to know whether Katie goes to college and becomes an award-willing journalist and whether Lillian becomes a scientist (her dream,) the Epilogue is a letter written by Kate to Horace Carter, in which she imagines a future where women, Black and White, can achieve greatness. She leaves us—and Katie and Lillian—wanting more. Kudos!

Baldwin’s bio:

Carol Baldwin

A typical day for Carol Baldwin includes writing, working as a publicist for Monarch Educational Services, blogging, planning or teaching a writing workshop, serving as the blog coordinator for Write2Ignite, or mentoring a young writer. In between you might catch her in a Pilates class, trying to improve her golf game, planting flowers, or savoring a piece of chocolate. She has two nonfiction books for adults, two non-fiction books for adults. Friendship Counseling: Biblical Foundations for Helping Others and Teaching the Story: Fiction Writing In Grades 4-8, and several works-in-progress. Read more about her on social media.