MADreads

Seriously. In this young adult novel, high school is the worst. Todd Mayer has died and no one at his school will answer any questions or admit to knowing him when the police investigate. Things are not right, that's for sure. Georgia's brother goes to school with Todd and is in the same grade, even, and won't acknowledge that he knows Todd. So what's up?

Though slavery ended in 1865, the importation of Africans as slaves was outlawed nearly fifty years earlier in 1808 with an act of Congress banning the practice. The truth, like most everything in history regarding race, is far from black and white. Environmental journalist and Alabama waterman Ben Raines sheds light on just how the ghosts of the slave trade, long thought well-buried, exist surprisingly close to the surface both literally and figuratively in The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning.

Tempest Raj has returned to her childhood home after a stunt in her Las Vegas magic show went dangerously (almost fatally) awry. Not only has she lost her successful show, but she's still facing legal issues related to the accident, an accident she knows is not her fault. Now home she has to figure out her next steps and while she's lying low licking her wounds, her dad asks her to take a job with his Secret Staircase Construction company. Her first act to help her dad is to examine a house that's being renovated.

This book is described as a smash-up of art and text that captures 2020 and what it was like to be black during the COVID-19 lockdown and racial unrest and protests. It is incredible:  painful, powerful, and beautiful. Told in three sections called Breath One, Breath Two and Breath Three, I viewed the book as illustrated poetry with the parts representing the past, present and future.