Should this book stay on the list?

Yes—important read about events few of us ever learned about. Some conflict about it being written by a white author and containing a fair amount of white saviorism but it is still an important window into events not enough white people are taught.

Yes! A former student recommended this to me and I was glad to read it. I also had never studied any of this in my history classes. Important issue to learn about!

Yes. I chose to pair reading this with Black Wall Street, which is a non-fiction look at the growth and destruxtion of the Greenwood community. I did so because one of my other reading challenges required that I do a fiction/non-fiction pairing. I think that this would be an especially good read as an intro to the Tulsa massacre, because the non-fiction about that time period can be dense. Having the mystery element of the unknown identity of the body in the carraige house helped drive the narrative.

I do wish that the characters in the contemporary parts of the book were a little more nuanced, especially since this is a book about race, and the protagonist is a biracial young woman.

Melissa (the other Book Girl) took my family to the Greenwood District during one of our visits to Tulsa, so I especially enjoyed the descriptions of what this area looked like prior to 1921. It’s so hard to fathom that this history went untaught for so many years. While I don’t think reading this historical fiction is a replacement for learning the full true story, I thought it was very well done and a great way to introduce readers and encourage them to want to learn more!

I read this one last year and have been recommending it since. This is such an important story, and as a former history teacher, I’m ashamed that I didn’t know about this event. If I was still teaching, this book would be in my classroom and the subject would be taught. As it is, I have gifted copies to my teacher peeps still in the classroom.