Span­ning from a bucol­ic horse farm in the north­east to a swel­ter­ing army base in 1940’s Mont­gomery, Alaba­ma, In the Shad­ow of Alaba­ma is a mas­ter­ful sto­ry of the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence by acclaimed author Judy Reene Singer. It is a sto­ry of war and love final­ly com­ing to res­o­lu­tion some 50 years after its ori­gin. And it is also a deeply per­son­al nov­el inspired by the author’s own father who as a Jew­ish sol­dier dur­ing WWII was put in charge of an all-African Amer­i­can pla­toon in the seg­re­gat­ed South. The expe­ri­ence left him embit­tered and with­drawn and his fam­i­ly rela­tion­ships became col­lat­er­al dam­age. Rachel Fleis­ch­er has good rea­sons not to be at her father’s deathbed. Foal­ing sea­son is at hand and her hors­es are becom­ing rest­less and dif­fi­cult. Her crit­i­cal moth­er and grasp­ing sis­ter could cer­tain­ly han­dle Mar­ty Fleisher’s resis­tance bet­ter with­out her. But Malachi her eighty-some­thing horse man­ag­er — more father to her than Mar­ty has ever been — con­vinces Rachel she will regret it if she doesn’t go. When a stranger at her father’s funer­al deliv­ers an odd gift and an apol­o­gy Rachel finds her­self drawn into the epic sto­ry of her father’s World War II expe­ri­ence and the friend­ships trau­ma scan­dal and betray­als that would scar the rest of his life — and cast a shad­ow across the entire fam­i­ly. As she strug­gles to make sense of his time as a Jew­ish sergeant in charge of a pla­toon of black sol­diers in 1940s Alaba­ma. She begins to see how his hopes and dis­ap­point­ments mir­ror her own — and might final­ly give her the means to free her­self of the past and choose a life wait­ing in the wings.