When Jacob is called back to Advocate, he is not only returning home again, something he knows he cannot really do; he is going to face his dying grandmother and the people of the town who turned on one of their own.

Twenty years earlier, when his uncle David came home, it was to die. The response in Advocate was typical of most towns, large and small, in 1984: when his disease became known, Jacob, his grandmother, his mother, and his aunt, were shunned, turned out from school and their jobs, out of fear of an until-then unknown virus.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel beloved of one of the main characters, Advocate is elegiac, written by a first-rate author, about overcoming ignorance and prejudice. With wit and emotional depth, Greer describes the formation of one boy's social conscience and takes us to a resolution that is truly satisfying.