The year is 1943. Dan, a young man living in Loring, Mississipi, is eager to leave home and join the Army. His dad is dead, and the bank took over his family’s farm. Dan and his “colored” colleague L.C. work for Dan’s uncle Alvin by driving two old school buses that were converted into rolling snack stands. Marty, a friend of Dan’s from the same town is stationed there as a guard for a camp of German POW’s.

This is not an easy book to read. Besides having to keep the characters straight, it involves getting into the psyches of guys struggling with questions of racial inequality, considering the necessity or opposition to being in the armed service, and being so close to German prisoners of war. The story of these three young men comes alive with friendship as well as conflict as they struggle individually. Nothing comes easy for any of these three men. Their story brings the reader with a heavy hand into the heart and mentality of a small Southern town in some very difficult times. ( )

Loring, Mississippi hides family secrets, uses German Prisoners of War to pick cotton, prepares boys to become men at war and forces others to make sense of it all within the human shells they’ve been provided. Steve Yarbrough’s Prisoners of War transports readers back to a small southern town unveiling all its skeletons and confronting an array of social issues related to the 1940s. This story discovers a town full of inhabitants, beyond the war prisoners, who are prisoners of themselves.Through gracefully interwoven storylines, Yarbrough immediately proves his worth as a writer by developing the numerous characters through their actions rather than blatantly giving character descriptions. This engages readers by allowing the imagination to create each individual’s attributes, and thus developing a more personal relationship with the character. Beginning with Dan Timms, a 17-year-old boy eagerly awaiting his 18th birthday to join the Armed Services and leave Loring, Yarbrough slowly introduces more townsfolk throughout the novel. Dan’s inner demons are revealed as he tries desperately to do right for his mother after his father’s suicide, but he still wishes to run away to war. Yarbrough demonstrates this when he says about Dan, “He hadn’t been where they were fighting, and he figured when he got there, he’d have a new set of problems. Then maybe the old ones would matter a lot less.” Upon his return from the frontlines, Yarbrough depicts Dan’s friend Marty Stark as a lost soul returned from the frontlines trying to cope with being a living corpse. He also shows Dan’s mother Shirley as a resilient widow embarking on a new life of singlehood when she takes on a new job as a telephone operator and gives up on romance with Dan’s uncle, Alvin. Alvin’s hired hand L.C. copes with being a prisoner of his black skin in a white man’s world. Yarbrough captures the essence of a shared humanity in these characters by providing a taste of their individual lives and how they interconnect. Secrets are shown through such glimpses as Marty’s father having an affair and seeing how Frank Holder, a racist, learns many valuable lessons about tolerance through his son after his son’s death in the war. The three-dimensional characters are well developed and Yarbrough clearly identifies their personal struggles, the motives behind their decisions and how these decisions affect others within Loring.Yarbrough effectively keeps suspense throughout the book by telling the story without giving away everything, such as when Frank describes seeing his wife, “…She’d have a smile on her face, too, on Christmas Eve, when he would walk in and find her sitting in exactly the same place, with that same piece of paper lying on her knee once again, her body already growing cold and stiff.” These peeks at future events entice readers to understand the unsaid on their own, which speaks volumes for Yarbrough’s writing ability.His vivid prose creates amazing imagery of this small town and all its daily dealings. In handling the issues related to this era, Yarbrough’s command of language explicitly illustrates racial tensions, including correctly representing 1940s Southern dialect and bringing stirring prose to his writing. As Frank Holder tells L.C., “’Keep improving that comportment and you can’t never tell, maybe one day you’ll make janitor at the Piggly Wiggly. Ever nigger loves the city.’” Yarbrough proves eloquent as an author time and time again. With each chapter and with so many underlying themes ranging from racism and patriotism to war-profiteering and draft-dodging, he never loses the momentum of the tale. He manages to intertwine all of the characters and social issues into one grand, climactic story. ( )