By Mildred D. Taylor
A Newbery Medal novel about the Logans, a Black family who own their land in 1930s Mississippi, and the year Cassie learns exactly what that land, and her family's pride, will cost them.
Cassie Logan is nine, sharp-tongued, and proud, and she doesn't yet understand why her family is different from the sharecropping families around them: the Logans own their land. It's Depression-era Mississippi, and over one hard year Cassie watches the price of that independence come due. Night riders ride the roads, a family is burned, the local store where her people are cheated becomes a battleground, and Cassie herself runs headlong into what it means to be Black in a town run on fear and debt. Her parents are fierce and loving and unbowed, and the story is really about what they teach her: how to hold your head up, and when to hold your tongue to survive. It's a hard, unforgettable, deeply human book.
This is the classroom cornerstone for the American history a grades 6-8 room is ready to face head-on. Cassie is such a vivid, funny, hot-tempered narrator that children bond to her fast, and that bond is what carries them through the hard truths of the Jim Crow South, land, debt, racial terror, and a family's dignity under it. It's a book that trusts young people with the real thing while giving them fierce, loving parents to hold onto, and it rewards the after-conversation more than almost anything else on the shelf. A Newbery Medal winner and a fixture of middle-school reading for good reason.