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    Stand Your Ground
    Stand Your Ground
    Stand Your Ground
    Audiobook10 hours

    Stand Your Ground

    Written by Victoria Christopher Murray

    Narrated by Suzzanne Douglas and Madeleine Maby

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In number-one Essence-best-selling author Victoria Christopher Murray's new novel, three women must grapple with their faith and belief in justice when they become caught up in a highly charged murder trial involving the death of an African American teenage boy whose shooter maintains a ""stand your ground"" defense. Stand Your Ground is the story of three women who find themselves thrown together because of the most horrible of situations. Janice Johnson suffers through every mother's nightmare when she finds out that her 16-year-old son, Marquis, was murdered in the parking lot of a convenience store. But she and her husband's horror becomes greater when they find out that the shooter has not been arrested. The Johnsons begin a quest to get justice for their son - though the Johnsons want to take different roads to justice. Janice wants to work with the police while her husband calls on his brother who is a member of the Brown Guardians, a militant group who've been accused of being nothing more than street vigilantes. This struggle drives a wedge between Janice and her husband at a time when they should be drawing closer together. It doesn't help that there's been infidelity in their marriage in the past that is rearing its head again. Shelly Vance cannot believe that she is in the middle of this nightmare. Her husband, Wyatt, has killed a teenager who he says attacked him. And now that tragedy has been magnified by the racial divide that it's created in the city. Matters are made worse when her husband is finally arrested and put on trial. And by extension Shelly finds herself being judged by everyone, from her employer to her friends. But no matter what, Shelly is going to stand by her husband, even though she has a secret that could blow this case wide open.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 9, 2015
    ISBN9781490694696
    Stand Your Ground
    Author

    Victoria Christopher Murray

    Victoria Christopher Murray is the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of more than thirty novels, including Stand Your Ground, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year and NAACP Image Award Winner. Her novel, The Personal Librarian, which she cowrote with Marie Benedict was a Good Morning America Book Club pick.  Visit her website at VictoriaChristopherMurray.com.

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    Reviews for Stand Your Ground

    4.5/5

    24 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 5/5
      Emotionally hard content, but very well done and a worthwhile read. Although for the audiobook the about book info/summary is off. The killer's wife name is wrong in it, but most importantly, there's no storyline about a juror so no idea why it says there is. Didn't take from how thought-provoking and great a book it is though.
    • 5/5
      Awesome book. The author does a amazing job with details and emotions. I recommend, this book as it states the injustice with our justice system.
    • 3/5
      Janice. The mother of Marquis, a teenaged boy who's been shot.Meredith. The wife of the man who shot Marquis.Wyatt. The white man accused of shooting and killing Marquis--who was black. Was Wyatt only standing his ground, as the law permits?Stand Your Ground by author Victoria Christopher Murray is one of those novels that's hard for me to rate. Even though ratings generally reflect how readers feel about a book, folks still judge a book's merit by its ratings. The measure of a reader's feelings and the measure of a book's merit aren't necessarily the same.This novel made me feel a number of emotions, including anger and sadness, as it's indeed a tragic story, in more ways than one. I was intrigued during a few moments, but on the whole, the story didn't surprise me. I do like how not all the characters of either race think exactly alike, none of them are perfect people, and there's some nuance in the black community's response to the killing.Now, while the novel doesn't have any words that network television would bleep out nowadays, there's some language I don't appreciate seeing in ChristFic. Other times the writing seems repetitive, clichéd, or keyword conscious, as if to fit in or repeat certain common phrases.More importantly, I would've liked to see more purpose and dimension for some of the characters. Although I liked seeing Meredith's perspective, she ultimately doesn't seem pivotal to the plot. The story's "bad guys" are like caricatures, and in the end, Wyatt's character just didn't make sense to me.In all, my biggest takeaways from this read are reminders not to take prejudgments as facts and to beware of accepting "loud" perceptions without thinking critically, without searching and listening carefully, listening closely, for truth.
    • 4/5
      While the book Stand Your Ground is a novel it clearly based on the horrific events that have been playing out in our communities and on our screens over the past year. It was a fast read, an emotional read and I finished it in less than a day. It was easy to relate to Janice and to every character in this book including her husband and others who were distrustful of the courts and wanted to seek their own type of justice. I probably would too, in my grief, despair and knowing that justice might not be served. Yet, Janice stood her own ground as she sought justice without violence. The tensions between Janice and Tyrone were beautifully detailed as they grieved differently and separately which is so often the case. While this book is compulsively readable I did, at times, feel that it veered into the romance novel genre and the writing lost some of its depth. Yet, overall an eye-opening, truth-telling book about one of the most important issues of our time.