Only Great Changes — Meredith Sue Willis

Blair Morgan leaves college to fight poverty following a charismatic, but unconventional religious leader. The familiar conventions of the novel of initiation are made new by a convincing female protagonist and a narrative that uses politics as the setting and vehicle of individual maturation, focusing 1960's youth and political culture through finely cut lenses of race.Moments of personal anguish are at the heart of this novel, and they add up to a complex and convincing portrait of a young woman coming to grips with change.First published by Charles Scribner's Sons to critical acclaim in 1985, this middle book of the Blair Morgan trilogy takes Blair out of West Virginia to do anti-poverty work as a VISTA volunteer in urban Tidewater, Virginia.In Meredith Sue Willis's Only Great Changes, the familiar conventions of the novel of initiation are made new by a convincing female protagonist and a narrative that uses politics as the setting and vehicle of individual maturation. Willis locates the experience of coming of age in the matrix of a larger history, focusing 1960's young and political culture through finely cut lenses of region, gender, and race.