NEWS
No Place Safe wins the Colorado Book Award in the category of Creative Nonfiction.
A poignant coming-of-age memoir, set in Atlanta as a serial murderer is targeting young black boys, is among this year's Colorado Book Awards winners. Boulder author Kim Reid's No Place Safe: A Family Memoir, took top honors in the "creative nonfiction" category. --- Rocky Mountain News
INTERVIEWS & ARTICLES
REVEWS
Part mystery thriller, part coming-of-age story, and part civil-rights history, this gripping memoir is set at the time of the horrific Atlanta child murders and told through the eyes of a young African American teen whose mom is a cop on the task force searching for the serial killer. Just after the first two bodies are found in 1979, Kim, 13, enters a white private school in the suburbs, far from her inner-city neighborhood. Over the next two years, a total of 29 black boys are found dead. Is the killer a Klansman type? Could he be a black man? The racism at school is ugly. No one there cares about the murdered inner-city kids. So why does Kim stay in the fancy school? Is she playing white? Is she running for safety? As the climax builds, and her mom brings home more and more details of the murder investigation, Kim's personal conflicts are as intense for her as the terror outside. -- Booklist
Reid's well-composed, straightforward memoir recounts the two fraught years of her adolescence when a serial killer terrorized Atlanta. Reid's mother, an investigator in the Fulton County District Attorney's Office in 1979, told her every detail of the quest for the murderer of 29 victims, mostly young black boys. Meanwhile, Reid attended a Catholic school in an all-white part of town, torn between loyalty to her black neighborhood friends and the desire to fit in with the white kids and feel safe at her private school, located far from the danger zone of her neighborhood…Reid maintains a lively sense of dialogue and characterization, and her memoir is an affecting tale of a girl's transformation in a climate of fear and pervasive, bleak Southern racism. -- Publisher’s Weekly
What folks are saying
"Like every great memoir writer, Kim Reid bares her heart and soul in this powerful account of growing up in a world of danger. Her honesty and storytelling skills make every page come alive."
--Kien Nguyen, author of The Unwanted
A gracefully written, vivid, heartfelt and deeply intimate work. Against the backdrop of Atlanta's infamous and still controversial child-murder spree, thirteen year old Kim Reid demonstrates uncanny wisdom, grit and confidence as she overcomes the fear and panic gripping Atlanta's children, to narrate her compelling personal story; all the while bringing to heartbreaking life each of the murdered boys. If we want to understand the hearts of today's children being inundated with daily stories of slain or kidnapped classmates and the threatening world we say is waiting for them, we would do well to spend some time with Kim Reid.
-- Robert Hooks, Actor/ Producer/ Cultural Activist
No Place Safe, a dazzling debut by Kim Reid, is so compelling you won't stop reading until you finish. This brilliantly written memoir, set against a two-year reign of murder and terror in Atlanta, is told from the unique perspective of an adolescent fearing for her safety and that of her younger sister while watching her police detective mother work feverishly to solve the child murder cases and restore her sense of order and safety. As the murders grow increasingly close to her own home, Kim realizes that there is no place safe…
-- Carolyn Quick Tillery, author of Southern Homecoming Traditions
