The Season of Styx Malone

In Sutton, Indiana, ten-year-old Caleb Franklin narrates a summer that begins when he and his older brother Bobby Gene meet Styx Malone, a confident sixteen-year-old in foster care who appears in the woods near their home. Restless under his father's insistence that the family remain safely ordinary, Caleb is drawn into Styx's Great Escalator Trade, a chain of swaps beginning with fireworks and aimed at a prized moped. The scheme brings adventure, trouble, and exposure to lives unlike his own. Beneath the humor and escalating trades, the novel explores foster care, parental fear shaped by race, trust, betrayal, and forgiveness, and the differing meanings of freedom for sheltered brothers and a boy longing for a stable home. A Coretta Scott King Honor Book and Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner, it is noted for centering Black boys in a contemporary middle-grade story of friendship and family.

Author: Kekla Magoon · Original publisher: Wendy Lamb Books (New York), 2018