Finding Langston

It is 1946, and eleven-year-old Langston has just lost his mother. His father moves them from rural Alabama to a small apartment in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, part of the Great Migration of Black families to Northern cities. Langston misses his grandmother's Sunday cooking and the magnolia trees his mother loved, his father is always working, and at school he is picked on as a country boy. Then he finds the public library, open to him in a way the libraries back home never were, and there he discovers the poems of Langston Hughes, the writer his mother named him after. Lesa Cline-Ransome's short novel, the first in a trilogy about boys in 1940s Chicago, won the 2019 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.