Your Plantation Prom Is Not Okay

Your Plantation Prom Is Not Okay
By Kelly McWilliams
Little, Brown and Company, 2023. 312 pages. Young Adult

High school senior Harriet Douglass lives on a former plantation called Westwood in Louisiana. Their plantation is different than others in the area, because it's a restored museum honoring the enslaved people who worked and lived there. Harriet loves being a tour guide and teaching visitors the hard truth about Westwood, even when the weight of its tragic history takes an emotional toll on her. Since her mom's death from cancer, Harriet has also had trouble regulating her emotions, and when her "rage monster" shows up, she loses her temper quickly. When a white actress buys the plantation next door - turning it into a wedding and prom venue - Harriet needs help from her friends. They decide to use social media to fight back and spread the truth about plantations; that the human spirit triumphed amid so much misery, and today the grounds should be treated respectfully and with reverence. 

The author's portrayal of grief in this novel is well-written and appropriately nuanced; readers will feel angry and sad and will cheer for Harriet all at the same time. The book's confrontation of the romanticization of plantations and present-day medical neglect of the Black community is not only important, but necessary. It's an emotional exploration of the continued impact that America's racist history has on contemporary society. The book left me desperately wanting to be a visitor to the fictional Westwood Plantation, which is very similar to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana that currently functions as a museum and memorial for enslaved people. The Whitney Plantation in Louisiana even has a beautiful statue with wings much like the statue of Anna described in McWilliams' book. I wholeheartedly recommend this novel.

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Reynolds insists from the first paragraph that "this is not a history book," and he's right; what instead he has created, in high rhetorical style, is a taking-to-account of American racism: how it got here, why it sticks around, and why it needs to stop. This young reader's edition begins its argument in the European explorations and conquests of the fifteenth century, proceeding through slavery in colonial America through the Black Lives Matter movement of today. It's not an upward journey, though: the book takes a determinedly radical approach to racism and antiracism. Its heroes are John Brown, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis rather than Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., or Barack Obama. It's a point of view rarely seen in books for young people. Readers who want to truly understand how deeply embedded racism is in the very fabric of the U.S., its history, and its systems will come away educated and enlightened.

This Is My America
By: Kim Johnson
Random House, 2020. 406 pages. Young Adult

For the past seven years, 17-year-old Tracy Beaumont has been writing weekly letters to Innocence X in the hopes that a lawyer there will take her father's case to help free him from a wrongful murder conviction that put him on death row. He and another Black man were accused of killing a white couple. Tracy is willing to do anything to get Innocence X's attention, even hijack her brother Jamal's interview with the local news station. Not long after that, one of their classmates, a white girl, is murdered, and Jamal is accused of the crime. Remembering how their father was treated, Jamal goes on the run, and Tracy is torn between clearing him and working to free her father. Little does she know that both cases intersect, connecting through a long-buried history in the town that is starting to come to light.

LKA