" 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.