The Reckoning
by Wade Hudson
Middle School    Crown    256 pp.
1/24    9780593647776    $18.99
Library ed.  9780593647783    $21.99
e-book ed.  9780593647790    $10.99

Lamar Phillips, a contemporary middle schooler in Morton, Louisiana, wants to be a filmmaker. With the new camcorder his grandfather helped him buy, he interviews students, records school football and baseball games, and films scenes in the neighborhood, but he feels like “nothing ever happens in Morton” and intends to do something bigger with his filmmaking. Gramps, a Black civil rights activist and Freedom Rider of the 1960s, has always stressed the importance of learning his past, where he came from—Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—and Lamar begins to see how interesting Gramps’s own story is. He “worked the crops” for Old Man Claude, lived in a house with no plumbing, didn’t go to school much, and fought in Vietnam. Lamar wants to make a documentary about Gramps, but when his grandfather is killed by a known former Klansman, Lamar films the resultant protests and the MAGA counter-protests. In straightforward, unadorned prose, Hudson (Defiant, rev. 11/21) tells an important story about an all-too-common contemporary tragedy and manages to be angry and hopeful at the same time. For a slim volume, the book carries the weight of a difficult history and the urgency to carry on the fight: “Listen, son, now is your time. It’s your generation that’s got the future in its hands.” And with his video footage, Lamar intends to do justice to his grandfather’s story.

From the January/February 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.