For Lamb - Hardcover

Cline-Ransome, Lesa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823450155 ISBN 13: 9780823450152

Publisher: Holiday House, 2023

Synopsis

An interracial friendship between two teenaged girls goes tragically wrong in this powerful historical novel set in the Jim Crow South.

For Lamb follows a family striving to better their lives in the late 1930s Jackson, Mississippi. Lamb’s mother is a hard-working, creative seamstress who cannot reveal she is a lesbian. Lamb’s brother has a brilliant mind and has even earned a college scholarship for a black college up north-- if only he could curb his impulsiveness and rebellious nature.

Lamb herself is a quiet and studious girl. She is also naive.  As she tentatively accepts the friendly overtures of a white girl who loans her a book she loves, she sets a off a calamitous series of events that pulls in her mother, charming hustler uncle, estranged father, and brother, and ends in a lynching. 

Told with nuance and subtlety, avoiding sensationalism and unnecessary brutality, this young adult novel from celebrated author Lesa Cline-Ransome pays homage to the female victims of white supremacy.


A South Carolina Book Award Nominee
A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
A Horn Book Fanfare Book
A Booklist Editors’ Choice
A CSMCL Best Multicultural Children’s Book of the Year
A BookPage Best Young Adult Book of the Year
A Bank Street Best Book of the Year - Outstanding Merit
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

About this title

About the Author

Lesa Cline-Ransome is the author of more than twenty books for young readers including the award-winning Finding Langston trilogy. Her work has received a plethora of honors, including dozens of starred reviews, NAACP Image Award nominations, a Coretta Scott King honor, the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction and a Christopher Award. Her work has been named to ALA Notable Books and Bank Street Best Children’s Book lists and she lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

Reviews

Gr 10 Up—In this sweeping tale of the Jim Crow South for a Black family, Cline-Ransome weaves the voices of the family and several outsiders toward a climactic end. Protagonist Lamb is a young Black girl living with her seamstress mother and older brother. And while Lamb's dad has been absent much of her life, she discovers his proximity to them. In connecting with her dad, she also befriends a white girl, and both budding relationships position the family for trouble. Emotionally gutting, Cline-Ransome's use of multiple points of view focuses the story on the deeper lives of each character. The characters are three dimensional, motivated by love, connection, fear, and ambition. The short chapters create a calm introspective pace as the story is introduced, which then turns into controlled chaos by the end and leaves readers breathless (and angry). The highly charged atmosphere that develops is similar to A Sitting in St. James by Rita Williams-Garcia and Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez both in the sweeping family tales and the connection to history. This book is a statement with its setting in Jackson, MS, in the 1930s, Lamb's mother's sexuality, Lamb and her brother's advancement through education, and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan on Black people. Unendingly powerful, the story and characters are unforgettable. VERDICT Leave no doubt that this should be purchased for collections serving older teens. There will be much to discuss.—Alicia Abdul

Edition details

• Publisher: Holiday House
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0823450155
• ISBN 13: 9780823450152
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304