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 "Marlette wants to hunt out and attack the seminal issues - race, history, shame.  The storytelling is involving and the plot wondrously complicated: a tall tale about terrible times that were, in memory, magical and magnificent. In "Magic Time . . . Marlette has captured something essential about the spirit of our age."

Christopher Dickey
The New York Times Book Review
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MAGIC TIME is one of the top 30 "highly anticipated,
must-read titles" in Kirkus' Fall preview.

"Marlette sets a harmonic tone, both glorious and deeply moving. Perfectly captures a time of epic change. An exceptional work of Southern fiction."

Kirkus (Starred Review)
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Exciting praise for Doug Marlette's MAGIC TIME!

NPR Christmas Pick:
"Cross your fingers and hope Hollywood doesn't give Russell Crowe the lead role when they make the movie that will inevitably spring from this novel. Its central character is Carter Ransom, scion of a distinguished Mississippi family and much-lauded liberal journalist. When an old investigation of the murder of four civil rights workers -- one of them Carter's first love -- reopens and results in a new trial, Carter has to reexamine everything he knows."

-–Karen Grigsby Bates, National Public Radio

"Charming, engaging, and gripping."

-–Washington Post
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"... the prize-winning master storyteller knits a beguiling tale of love, idealism, family, mystery , and long-awaited triumph of justice ... vividly captures the spirit of an era of epic change ... "Magic Time" is a page-turner , its intricate plot matched by the profundity of its moral vision. It is a compelling legal thriller, touching tribute, and zesty love story, rolled into one . Marlette has crafted an exceptional work of Southern fiction."

-–Boston Globe
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"A powerful plot that straddles every genre from historical fiction to love story."

-–New York Daily News

"It’s an intricate piece of work: multi-layered, interwoven ... and even Dickensian ... And despite that expansiveness, there’s a remarkable economy, as well ... both the subject and the story prove to be engaging ... Magic Time ultimately succeeds as both a heartfelt novel and a serious one too, under-girded by a keen eye for historical and social detail, driven forward by a sense of justice, and revealing in so many instances a sometimes-surprising optimism and a generous sense of humanity."

-–Metro Magazine

Full of shadows and peripheries, "Magic Time" attempts big themes: identity, family, fathers and sons, love, loss and redemption. Historical individuals and occurrences are seamlessly incorporated into fiction, restoring humanity, tension and ambiguity to events the warm, golden glow of hindsight too often renders as comfortable and certain.

-–Charleston Post and Courier 

Marlette, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, has written a powerful and eloquent novel filled with all the emotions and fury of the early Sixties. Highly recommended for all public libraries.

-–Library Journal (Starred Review)

Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Marlette fulfills the literary promise of his debut novel, The Bridge (2002), with a panoramic saga that revisits an ignominious chapter in Mississippi history
. . . A tenacious legal thriller, touching remembrance-of-youth novel, and spicy love story rolled into one, Marlette's majestic and detailed second offering communicates the assured finesse of a seasoned author.

-–Booklist

"In Magic Time, Doug Marlette does with words what we are used to seeing him do so masterfully with pictures: he sets us down firmly in a sharply drawn time and place and tells us a great story. Magic Time proves that The Bridge was no fluke: Marlette is a great writer of Southern fiction, and he understands that region as it was in the turbulent days of the Civil Rights Movement, and as it has reshaped itself since."

-–Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

"It was the summer that divided time in America, and Doug Marlette has brought it-and the people who lived through and after it-so stingingly alive that it can never be forgotten. Magic Time is a blazing beautiful novel."

-–Anne Rivers Siddons, author of Peachtree Road and Sweetwater Creek

"I have always loved that word, 'page-turner' and that is just what Doug Marlette has done with Magic Time. He bridges the modern south to one of its bleakest, most violent periods and does so with a story that you can't put down. I love the way Marlette brings my south to life with all its glory and warts. With this book, with the dilemma that modern day southerners find themselves in because of their ancestors' actions, we see once again what Faulkner meant about how the past is never dead or even past."

-–Rick Bragg, best-selling author of
All Over But the Shouting, and Ava's Man

"Doug Marlette knows how to make a reader turn the page, again and again, with rising excitement. But he's after more than that in Magic Time. He sets out to fill in the canvas of the modern South with the darker colors of its history. He shows us every kind of Southerner, from the noblest to the worst. He makes his characters answer for who they are and where they come from, but he loves them-all of them. We can't ask for more from a novelist or a novel."

-–Mark Childress, author of
Crazy in Alabama and the forthcoming One Mississippi

"As in The Bridge, Doug Marlette asks urgent questions about society and directs us to look for the answers within our own hearts. His kind intelligence shows through in every word. He's one of my favorite writers."

-–Kaye Gibbons, author of
Ellen Foster and Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster

"Magic Time is a beautiful memorial to the brave young people who made the ultimate sacrifice in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, 1964. Doug Marlette has vividly captured the spirit of history that animated those of us who were part of that extraordinary time."

—U.S. Congressman John Lewis