It’s 1961, and Harriet Elizabeth Oechsner has almost completed her sophomore year in high school, when she’s faced with the dreaded news that her family is moving again. This time it’s because her father Erik’s liberal theology and commitment to social justice has angered his parishioners, and he’s been forced to resign from his church after only a year as pastor. The resulting move thrusts the five members of the close knit Oechsner family into a community bathed in privilege, steeped in tradition, and staunchly resistant to change. Mountain Brook, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, is a community separated only by a mountain ridge from the struggle for human rights being waged on the other side. And yet, it’s a community so distanced by privilege and color from its parent city and the needs of the poor and disenfranchised within, that it may as well be on the other side of the world.
Harriet must once again assume the role of the outsider adapting to another new school, her third in three years. Her encounters with new teachers and peers lead her into situations that are at times painful, lonely, embarrassing, shocking, and often humorous. Harriet’s adjustment to her new school is fraught by teenage angst and emotion; and, as a child of the Cold War and the civil rights era, she is thrust into the realities of injustice, separation, and the threat of nuclear holocaust. However, the story maintains a hopeful tone, as the plot is interwoven with themes of inclusiveness, loyalty, friendship, and reconciliation. Readers who fell in love with Hattie Robinson in Hattie’s Place and In the Fullness of Time, will be happy to know that Over the Mountain takes up two generations later, with Hattie’s granddaughter and namesake, Harriet, as the main character.
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