Life becomes far more difficult for teenaged, book-devouring Asa after her parents, African-American author Titus Horace and his Jewish wife Ardene, inherit a large farm in Kidron, North Carolina, especially once Asa discovers that she and her brilliant father are not allowed in the town’s public library. Asa and Ardene enlist an incredible and diverse cast of characters in a scheme to open Kidron’s first “colored” library, and the successes and failures of the endeavor force Asa into a coming-of-age journey of tremendous joy and suffering.

C.P. Mangel lives and breathes literature and it shows on every page of A WOUNDED DEER LEAPS HIGHEST; each chapter starts with a literary quote, many of them obscure, and often opaque, until their resonance becomes clear in Asa’s painful and wondrous daily life in her new town. Asa’s relationships with her parents and neighbors are beautifully etched, deeply individual and detailed, and the progress of these friendships and familial ties feel so in-the-moment, it’s as though the reader is living through them in real time. Perhaps Asa’s discovery of the daily indignities and horrors of life under Jim Crow shouldn’t feel as shocking as they do, considering all the modern-day reader is aware of from this time period, but each slight is infinitely wounding and the acts of terror take one’s breath away; this is largely a credit to Mangel’s incredible characters, who are so lovingly rendered and profoundly specific, it feels as though the inhumanity is being dealt to the readers’ own family and friends. There are too many to name, but the stand-outs include the unusual and delightful Horace and Ardene; Asa’s love interest, the kind-hearted musician Virgil; Asa’s best friend and lost soul, Crystal; Miss Bertie, Asa’s fiercely intelligent and supportive teacher; the Holocaust survivor, Henryk; and the terrifying and brutal Sheriff Emerson, who only appears in a few scenes, but whose presence looms menacingly over the entire book.

The text of A WOUNDED DEER LEAPS HIGHEST reads like a unique prose/verse combination that takes a bit of getting used to, and at over 600 pages can seem a bit daunting for a young adult novel, but remarkably, the reader is left wanting to know more of Asa’s story. This reader, in particular, will wait patiently for the sequel, anxious to see what the incredible and inspiring character of Asa Horace will do with the rest of her life.

Poetic, soaring, and heartbreaking, C.P. Mange’s A WOUNDED DEER LEAPS HIGHEST irresistibly draws the reader into the world of Asa Horace, a 15-year old mixed-race girl confronting the Jim Crow South after her parents move the family from Chicago to North Carolina in 1950.

~Shari Simpson for IndieReader