Miracle at St. Anna » (Bargain)

James McBride burst onto the scene with The Color of Water, a memoir exploring the author's struggle to understand his biracial identity. A bit of a Renaissance man -- he's a skilled musician who has written for the likes of soul diva Anita Baker -- McBride crossed over into the fiction camp with the war novel Miracle at St. Anna.

James McBride's memoir, The Color of Water, was a literary achievement that topped bestseller lists for more than two years. Now McBride turns his extraordinary gift for storytelling to fiction. Miracle at St. Anna is a tale of courage and redemption inspired by the famed Buffalo soldiers of the 92nd Division and a little-known historic event in a small Tuscan village at the end of World War II-the massacre at St. Anna di Stazzema.

Stephanie Foote

- Book Magazine

McBride's new novel is a lyrical rendering of a few days in the lives of four members of the 92nd Division of Buffalo Soldiers in World War II, who find themselves behind enemy lines after one of their number rescues an Italian child. The novel unfolds the needs and desires of the four soldiers with sure, quick vignettes, weaving their lives together with the life of the Italian village in which they briefly stay. The soldiers soon recognize that despite their differences, they are all held in contempt by an army whose white leaders seem only too happy to sacrifice them. The book's value lies in its careful re-creation of the world of the Buffalo Soldier, whose service has been too-long forgotten, and in its unflinching willingness to examine not only institutional racism, but also the wounds inflicted on black soldiers by white superiors and by one another. McBride's careful treatment of the differences among his black characters and his measured understanding of the unsuspected perils of cross-cultural contact make the end of the book especially surprising. Schooled in hard lessons by the novel, readers may find its last pages anomalous and disappointing.