Reviewed by Thomas A. Peters for Readers' Favorite

Set primarily in the small cotton community of Money, Mississippi, the story begins in 1925 on Estella’s eighth birthday and follows her life through tribulation and triumph as she grows into a young woman. With her family to support her emotionally, Estella escapes virtual slavery as a sharecropper, progressing from a child picking cotton in the fields, to being a schoolgirl, to being the first in her family to graduate the eighth grade, to working hard as a maid and saving enough money to move from the South and find a new home with her uncle in Chicago. Along the way are a myriad of highs and lows: Estella falls in love with a good young man, she experiences the emotional tragedy of a relative being shot before her eyes simply for making one off-hand remark in regards to a white man’s property, she dances before a live performance of Louis Armstrong singing and playing his trumpet, she meets a young Jewish woman who has fled the coming Holocaust in Europe in search of a peaceful life in America, and she learns the foundations of how to respect others and love herself with the help of her family, all while enduring the often violent indignities inherent to the racially chiaroscuro South of the segregation era.

Sylvester Boyd Jr.’s The Road From Money: A Journey to Find Why? is an impressive debut novel from an author writing in a mature voice with earnest feeling for his characters and subject matter. The basic theme of the story - the asking of why by a child - is so universal that it could be translated into nearly any setting in human history; but it is with a great deal of poignancy and perseverance that Estella seeks to determine the root cause of the circumstances in which she finds herself confined within the society of the Jim Crow South. Books written about the treatment (or mistreatment) of a people that laws once defined as suitable for “ownership” may make for uncomfortable reading for some people, but as in the case of The Road From Money, a great deal of reflection on human nature in general, and the strengths and weaknesses of American society both past and present in particular, is available within this volume for any reader who wishes to partake of this thought-provoking read.

Although the book explores some unfortunately brutal events, the writing is not so graphic as to make it off-limits to young adults desiring to investigate conditions for African-Americans seeking to better themselves during the years between the leadership of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois. Moreover, the writing itself, both dialogue and narrative, flows cleanly in a manner to keep the pages turning. Boyd’s attention to dialect is superb and utterly honest; as in Hurston’s fictionalized Eatonville, speech patterns differ less with race but more with education as Estella’s teachers in the school at Greenwood are the only characters to speak “proper” English. Instead of crowding the stage with an extensive cast, Boyd’s focus on one family showcases his natural talent for bringing personas to life. By the end of the story, the reader is apt to feel as if they are reading about their own relatives and will want to proceed with the second book to follow Estella’s life as this planned trilogy continues in Chicago.