In 1967 David Floody watched from the Canadian shores of the Detroit River as the fires of racial hatred consumed Detroit in a five- day riot. That unforgettable experience became the basis for this novel. Fourteen-year-old Frank Phelan thought the violence was over. But when Ellie Fitzgerald, the only girl on an all-black baseball team from Detroit, is deliberately spiked in the face by the steel-shod shoe of a white player, Frank is right there. The chaos that follows stuns him. Frank is white. This is Canada. The 1967 Detroit race riot was last year, a mile away across the river from Frank's home in Windsor. That isn't the end of it. Frank and Ellie are avid fans of Detroit Tigers star, Al Kaline, and they are fated to meet again during a do-or-die game at the 1968 World Series. Here, they discover common bonds and join forces against a brutal racist foe. It could be the worst day of their lives, or the best... "He's white. She's black. Both must cross the divide of race and racism swirling around them. It helps that both are baseball fanatics. Step up to the plate for an exciting and winning read!" -Shirley Langer, author of Anita's Revolution www.davidfloody.com
About the Author: David Floody was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada two blocks from the busy Detroit River, under the arching black shadow of the Ambassador Bridge that spanned it and connected two cities, two countries and two cultures. The bridge and the Detroit auto tunnel were his unanticipated routes into the 1960s, the decade whose events and values would forever influence his life and writing. Against his parents' wishes, David attended Patterson Collegiate, the most racially integrated Windsor high school located in the black neighbourhood that grew up around the Windsor terminus of the historic Underground Railroad in the 1840s and meant freedom from enslavement for thousands of African-Americans fleeing the southern slave states. But most disturbing, in July of 1967, when he was twenty-one and working as a janitor to help pay his university tuition, David watched from the six-story high roof of Wyeth Brothers Drugs, near the Windsor shores of the Detroit River, as the fires of racial hatred consumed the Detroit Motor City he knew so well in a five-day race riot. This experience was forever seared into his imagination and became the basis for his Young Adult novel, The Colour of Pride. David has just completed the sequel to this novel, tentatively entitled, Triggers, wherein his maturing teenaged hero, Frank Phelan, is forced into an act of vigilante justice that will forever change his life when his first love, Starr Summers, is brutally assaulted and the law fails him. Look for it soon. David lives and writes in Tofino, British Columbia, in the midst of breathtaking Clayoquot Sound, with the support of his wife, Eileen, his friends and fellow writers in The Clayoquot Writers Group and his cabaret group, Performance Anxiety. David invites you to visit him at www.davidfloody.com.