By Christopher Paul Curtis
A hilarious family road trip from Michigan to Birmingham turns, in the summer of 1963, into a story about one of the civil rights era's worst days.
The Watsons are the funniest family in Flint, Michigan: Momma, Dad, teenage troublemaker Byron, ten-year-old narrator Kenny, and little Joetta. For most of the book you'll be laughing with them. Kenny's lips freeze to a car mirror. Byron gets his hair conked. Dad soups up the family car and names it the Brown Bomber. Then they all pile in and drive south to spend the summer with Grandma in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. What Kenny sees there, at a church one Sunday morning, changes him. Curtis spends two hundred pages making you love this family so that when the world turns on them, it hurts.
This is one of the most demanding books on the trail, in reading level and in weight, and it earns the demand. Curtis is a genuinely funny writer, so a child stays for the comedy well before any history shows up. That's the design: you spend two hundred pages with an ordinary, hilarious family, and then a real act of racial terror falls on people you've come to love. Kenny is ten, about the age of the child reading it, which is part of why it hits as hard as it does.