Stopping for green lights

by Alyce Miller

It is the late 1960s, and in the small university town of Brazil, Ohio, a young white girl embarks on a journey of political and sexual awakening the summer after Martin Luther King is assassinated. Chafing against her parents and what she perceives as their romanticized white liberal notions of integration, Tish tries to take on the characteristics of her militant black girlfriends. Her desire to be one of them is so strong it's palpable, yet no matter how hard she tries, she encounters a wall. All of Tish's confusion and loneliness seem to disappear when she meets and falls in love with Goody, a black man of nineteen who arouses in Tish a new sense of herself. But it will take a heartbreaking betrayal to help Tish truly make sense of her world, in a way that no one else can do for her. Stopping for Green Lights is a poignant evocation of the potent desire to fit in and the grander ambition to be extraordinary.