by Andrea L Rogers
Read by Candice Byrd
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Content: There is talk of death/murder and slurs against Native and Black people. It’s in the Middle Grade section of the bookstore, but I’m wondering if I need to move it.

When Cynthia and her family move from Dallas to Tulsa for her father’s new job, they move onto her grandparents’ farm while her parents look for a place to live in Tulsa. She’s not happy about this – she misses her friends and neighborhood in Dallas, but it gives her a chance to connect with her Cherokee heritage. Her mother was born Cherokee, but was adopted by white people, so Cynthia and her sisters really know very little about their heritage. But things turn sour when her older sister starts dating the Cherokee neighbor boy, and when Cynthia finds a journal from a girl who died 40 years earlier.

I wanted to like this one more than I did. It was a tough story, touching on racism – not just toward Native peoples but also black people. It was set in 1968, which made the racism more overt; Cynthia’s grandparents are not nice people. Though I’m not sure the “mystery” at the center of the book was clear. I had to listen to it a couple of times just to figure out what was going on. And I’m not sure that a younger reader will enjoy this (hence, thinking about moving it to a section where it will have a better chance to find its readers). And the moral of the story is that white men can’t be trusted. Which is not a bad moral.

That said, it wasn’t what I wanted it to be.