Stella Mills, a young girl in the segregated town of Bumblebee, North Carolina, in 1932, loves stories but struggles to get her own words onto paper, so she slips outside at night to practice writing by starlight. On one of those nights she and her little brother Jojo witness the Ku Klux Klan — nine men in sheets, burning a cross by the pond — and understand that they have seen something dangerous and forbidden. The sighting opens a season of change and menace: Stella's father and two other Black men make the humiliating, courageous trip to register to vote; a neighbor's house is burned; a white doctor refuses to treat Stella's mother after a snakebite; and violence moves closer to people Stella loves. Draper builds the novel episodically, out of school, church, family, and community scenes, and frames it with Stella's own developing voice — her school compositions, her newspaper ambitions, and the journal-keeping she inherited from her grandmother, on whose real journal Draper drew for the story. The middle-grade novel neither softens Jim Crow for young readers nor leaves its heroine without agency: Stella's growing confidence in words becomes the book's answer to fear. It became a New York Times bestseller and a widely adopted school text.
Author: Sharon M. Draper · Original publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers (New York), 2015