(2) YA Moving to a new town can prove stressful for anyone -- but for Calvin Greene and his family in 1955, it's also dangerous. African Americans passing for white, the Greene family has moved to Levittown, Pennsylvania, a known "sundown town" -- a suburb populated by white people that warns people of color to leave the area by sunset. Determined to grab a piece of the "American dream," Calvin's army-veteran father has advised him and his mother to forget their former lives in Chicago and assimilate as well as possible. Calvin's only solace is visiting his older brother, who is unable to pass as white and who runs a boarding school in an area where a developer is attempting to build an integrated community. At the school, Calvin meets Lily, a beautiful girl with "dark brown skin" who decides to take advantage of the new Brown v. Board of Education ruling by attending Calvin's all-white school. With his two worlds dangerously close to each other, tragedies involving people from his hometown prompt Calvin to act in the best interests of all those close to him -- even if it could cost him his life. Tension is evident from the beginning to the frenetic end of this page-turning novel, which weaves historical events into the narrative. Back matter includes an author's note and resources on topics including passing, the history of Levittown, and redlining.

Reviewer: Eboni Njoku | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2024

(2) YA Like so many young Black men, Andre Jackson feels invisible. Falsely accused and convicted of a crime, Andre emerges from juvenile detention intending to return to some sense of normalcy. However, he comes home to his rapidly gentrifying Portland, Oregon, neighborhood just as the world is plunged into a global pandemic. His friend Eric, who Andre hoped would help clear his name, is missing, which raises questions around why Eric's seemingly perfect, diverse family appears unconcerned about his vanishing without a trace. Are Andre's arrest and Eric's disappearance connected? As Andre begins to unravel the secrets around Eric and to make sense of his own post-release reality, he dares to pursue freedom in a world closed in by the COVID-19 pandemic, racism, and violence that is brewing much closer than he realizes. Johnson's (This Is My America, rev. 9/20) mystery-thriller is a gut-wrenching first-person look at the life of a young man who feels his disposability as a Black teen within the justice system while witnessing with the world the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd. The isolation of the pandemic and the intensity of the Black Lives Matter protests provide the backdrop to a riveting story line that is also a social commentary on power, privilege, marginalization, and the carceral system and its impact on Black men. Back matter includes an author's note and resources on topics including youth incarceration and transracial adoption.

Reviewer: Monique Harris | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2023

(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