When Winter Robeson Came
by Brenda Woods
Intermediate, Middle School    Paulsen/Penguin    176 pp.    g
1/22    978-5247-4158-7    $16.99
e-book ed.  978-1-5247-4159-4    $9.99

In August 1965, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts is “a volcano aching to erupt.” Twelve-year-old Eden Louise Coal, who lives just outside of Watts, is looking forward to the visit of her thirteen-year-old cousin, Winter Robeson, from Sunflower, Mississippi. Though Winter has a long list of things he wants to do, Eden realizes he is really there to find his father, who disappeared from Watts ten years earlier. Winter’s visit affords some cultural comparisons, as when Winter notes, “Y’all got a little Jim Crow here too, huh?” after Eden tells him she has only one white neighbor left after white flight claimed all the others. Eden plans to be a songwriter, and the verse novel’s text frequently achieves lines Eden herself would relish: “She’s like a musician / who has forgotten her notes,” Eden says of an elderly friend with dementia. The first-person narrative is unusually dense in thematic layers for such a short novel — neighborhood, family, friends, music, social justice, and dreams — themes that Eden begins to weave into songs by story’s end. This is a nuanced story, told from the heart and rooted in Woods’s (Zoe in Wonderland, rev. 7/16) own experiences in 1965 Watts, as related in the author’s note.

From the January/February 2022 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.