"It's not so easy being colored, is it?" I asked him.

Jackie half-smiled at my remark.

"Nope," he said. "It's not. Not always. Not every day."

Life can be complicated when you're a fifteen year-old white male, with eight siblings, a twin sister, a best friend who's African American, and a racist girlfriend who's the daughter of an arrogant, hot-tempered member of the Ku Klux Klan. Especially if you're growing up in 1963, the Civil Rights era, in Birmingham, Alabama, a place once widely known as the Most Segregated City in America.

This is the hometown of Mickey McQuade, his twin sister Marti, and Mickey's best friend Jackie Thomas, ordinary teenagers living in extraordinary times, forced to confront an unstable, hate-laden, and sometimes violent world.

Beyond All Sense and Reason is the debut novel of Mike Diccicco, award-winning Philadelphia ad copywriter turned author, someone who grew up during the sixties in Birmingham, who lived through a time of anger, bigotry and tumult, and who still remembers the heroic people and historic moments that changed American society forever.