Reviews
The "dark-thirty" is the perfect time for ghost stories and shivery childhood worries about monsters lurking in the dark, that half hour which is "neither day nor night and when shapes and shadows play tricks on the mind." These ten truly unsettling tales are crafted to be read with that twilight world in mind, each introduced and inspired by key events in African American history and oral story-telling traditions, including slavery, the first all-Black union for the Pullman train car porters, babies born with "The Sight," local "Conjure Women" who could "change luck or cure an ailment," segregation and Jim Crow, KKK lynchings, bus boycotts, as well as folklore from Nigeria that warns that "Evil needs an invitation" to enter a home. Drawn from McKissack's childhood experiences growing up in the American South and listening to her Grandmama's "hair-raising" tales based on real people and events in their community, McKissack creates her own otherworldly tales using her grandmother's technique of grounding the supernatural in the real world. Both thrilling and cautionary, each story has a lesson and a warning to the reader at its heart, just like McKissack's Grandmama taught her and her family while ostensibly entertaining the children. Prejudice is real and dangerous, and sometimes the only justice available to the world is through stories that inspire a sense of outrage, compassion, and commitment to a better world. Each of these tales would be a memorable and spellbinding reading experience to introduce and/or develop social justice lessons in the classroom.