This was a dauntingly long look, but it kept my interest the entire time, and even shocked me, at the end, with a surprise HEA. The surprise is that this book is not what I soon began to think it was ( a 50s nostalgia book). When he makes the point of a Yankee character going, out of curiosity, to see what the colored bathroom facilities looked like in a southern state, only to discover that those facilities were a board laid over the creek, and then comments that the 50s weren't as great as they're made out to be, my respect for Stephen King rose exponentially.
What's more, he kept that throughout the book. I was impressed that the story continue to move forward, but he manages to make it very clear that the majority of characters mostly disapprove , even though they feel unable to do anything, about racism. He shows people basically muddling through their lives, while coming to understand the difficulties that other people face. Yet, the moral of this story almost appears to be that there's very little that we can actually change. That is what worries me.