Inharmonious

Huf (A More Perfect Union) delivers a powerful story of two Black friends who enlist in the Army after Pearl Harbor and wind up with very different lives as veterans. In the wake of the Japanese attack, Florida resident Benny North, who is light-skinned, enlists and passes as white, while his friend Roscoe Crane, who is darker-skinned, is assigned to a unit for Black soldiers. Before deploying to Europe, Benny asks Roscoe to marry his sister, Cora, hoping that at least one of them will survive the war and return home to support her. Roscoe agrees, but their union is loveless, partly because Cora still loves her old beau, Lee, who has also enlisted. In Wales, Roscoe falls in love with a white woman and finds the type of acceptance he never had as a Black man in the U.S. But when he returns to Florida to fulfill his promise to Benny, he finds few prospects, and gets stuck in a demeaning job. Meanwhile, Benny is able to secure a mortgage through the GI Bill, but Roscoe is denied due to redlining. When Lee returns home, he and Cora advocate for Black veterans denied GI benefits, leading to intimidation from a racist mob that wields crowbars and tire irons outside Lee’s house. Huf enhances the drama with engrossing romance subplots, but the heart of the novel lies in its depiction of inequality among WWII veterans and the danger in fighting it. This will move readers. Agent: Tanera Simons, Greenstone Literary. (Feb.)