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OLDER FICTION
Johnson, Kim

This Is My America

416 pp. | Random | July, 2020 | Trade ISBN 978-0-593-11876-4 $17.99 | Library ISBN 978-0-593-11877-1 $20.99 | Ebook ISBN 978-0-593-11878-8 $10.99
(2) YA Tracy is running out of time. It's been seven years since her father was wrongly convicted of a double murder. Every week, Tracy writes to Innocence X, an organization that represents people who are unjustly convicted and sentenced to death, and tries unsuccessfully to convince them to work to get her father absolved and released. As if that burden weren't enough, Tracy's older brother Jamal is accused of killing Angela, a young white woman with whom he was secretly romantically linked. Now, Tracy not only has to get help for her father, whose execution date is less than a year away, but also must solve the mystery surrounding Angela's death, so that her brother doesn't suffer the same fate. This suspenseful story is unfortunately all too familiar--Black people suffering at the hands of police violence, an unjust legal system, and disproportionate incarceration rates--a narrative that is at once heroic and heartbreaking. Tracy is left to unravel a mystery that highlights and humanizes a number of pertinent issues regarding racism in America, the role of media and social bias in our perceptions of one another, and the grief and despair of the families of the incarcerated.
Reviewer: Monique Harris | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2020

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