Her teenage daughter, Jules, is all she has left. Her son died of a drug overdose after returning from Vietnam. At 42, she works two jobs and still can’t make ends meet. The protagonist, Mary Pat Fennessy, is a lifelong resident of one of Southie’s public housing projects. That tumultuous summer provides the backdrop to Dennis Lehane’s excellent and unflinching new novel, “Small Mercies.” The book has all the hallmarks of Lehane at his best: a propulsive plot, a perfectly drawn cast of working-class Boston Irish characters, razor-sharp wit and a pervasive darkness through which occasional glimmers of hope peek out like snowdrops in early spring. Tensions over desegregation have reverberated through Boston ever since. Parents there mobilized against the policy, vowing not to send their children to school in September if it went ahead. The first phase of the program was to begin 12 weeks later in two of the city’s poorest neighborhoods - all-white South Boston and mostly Black Roxbury. declared that in order to end de facto racial segregation in Boston’s public schools, a percentage of students from predominantly Black high schools would be bused to predominantly white ones, and vice versa.
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