Shine A Light On Me: A Story Of The Blues, Friendship and Memory - Couverture souple

Mo, Amanda; Mo, Joanna; Shi, Daniel; Torgersen, Oliver; Zhou, John

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798234175076

Editeur : Captain Johns Publishing Company, 2026

Synopsis

Four friends. One buried mystery. And a history their hometown almost forgot.

Charles, Irene, Grace, and Ravi are thirteen-year-olds trying to survive middle school in Sugar Land, Texas: detention, demanding parents, friendship drama, and one spectacularly disastrous band concert.

Then they stumble onto something far bigger than themselves.

A forgotten grave. A Civil War-era button. Old blues songs that seem to point toward the past. And beneath the neighborhoods, schools, and highways of modern Sugar Land lies the true history of the Sugar Land 95; African American prisoners forced to labor in Texas’s brutal convict-leasing system after the Civil War.

As the four friends follow the clues, the music becomes part of the mystery. Songs associated with legendary blues and folk musician Lead Belly lead them deeper into the history beneath their own community, and force them to ask who gets remembered, who gets forgotten, and what it means to belong to a place.

Shine a Light on Me is a story about friendship, music, memory, and the unexpected ways the past survives in the present. Funny in places, painful in others, it follows ordinary kids as they discover that history is not something locked inside a textbook.

Sometimes it is buried beneath your feet.

Sometimes it is carried in a song.

Readers who enjoyed the historical mystery of The Parker Inheritance, the humor and humanity of The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, or the way music carries memory through Echo will find something familiar here—but Shine a Light on Me tells a distinctly Sugar Land story, shaped by the young people growing up there today.

Inspired by the true history of the Sugar Land 95 and the music of Lead Belly, Shine a Light on Me was written collaboratively by five students from Sugar Land who began the project while they were in middle school. Their story brings together historical mystery, school life, blues music, Asian American family life, and the changing face of the American South.

It is a story about learning to hear the voices that came before us, and about discovering that you do not have to be born to a history to care enough to carry it forward.

Twenty percent of royalties from the book will be donated to the Friends of the Sugar Land 95 Memorial Fund, supporting efforts to preserve and honor the memory of the 95 individuals whose graves were discovered in Sugar Land.

For young readers, parents, teachers, and anyone who believes the stories we inherit still have something to teach us.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Captain Johns Publishing Company
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798234175076
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 220
• Éditeur: John Capt
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible