Hide Them from The Devil

5 Star Review

Click HERE to Purchase Your Copy Today!

Editorial Book Review:

By Michael Beas

Frankie Williams opens this novel with one of the most bracingly honest character introductions you are likely to encounter in contemporary Southern fiction. Margie knows exactly what she is. She has always known. And the fact that she doesn't particularly care is precisely what makes her so fascinating and so uncomfortable to spend time with across these pages.

She is sixteen, beautiful, wealthy, and operating inside a worldview so thoroughly constructed around her own entitlement that the Civil Rights Movement doesn't just inconvenience her. It physically undoes her. The image of Margie on her knees, vomiting at the idea of Black Americans having the same rights as she does, is not played for shock. It is played for truth, and Williams has the courage to let it sit there without flinching. That refusal to soften or excuse is what gives the book its real power.

What Williams is building here is a portrait of a particular kind of American woman at a particular hinge moment in American history, when the ground she had always assumed was solid revealed itself to be something else entirely. The Civil Rights Movement as a seismic event is not a backdrop in this novel. It is a force that arrives directly in Margie's body, and the way she responds to that force, by grabbing the lifeline Adriana throws her in the form of reckless, self-destructive behavior, tells you everything about how people protect their worldviews when reality refuses to cooperate.

The writing has a Southern cadence that feels genuinely inhabited rather than performed. Williams understands the rhythms of that world, the way privilege speaks to itself, the particular grammar of a community that has organized its entire self-image around a hierarchy suddenly being dismantled from the outside.

Margie is not a character you root for. She is a character you watch with the same horrified fascination you might feel watching someone walk toward something dangerous while completely convinced they are safe. That is an extraordinarily difficult thing to pull off in fiction, and Williams pulls it off from the very first page.