A SONG FOR HARLEM

McKissack’s third offering in her Scraps of Time historical fiction for new readers examines the life of fictional Lilly Belle Turner in 1928 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Told by Lilly Belle’s niece, Gee, the grandmother with the attic full of historical family artifacts, McKissack’s story closely follows the structure of the earlier entries. This time, 12-year-old Lilly Belle wins a writing contest, leaves her family in Smyrna, Tenn. and joins her Aunt Odessa in Harlem for a class with Zora Neale Hurston in the famed salon, the Dark Tower, run by A’Lelia Walker. One of the classmates plagiarizes a story from The Crisis magazine and Lilly Belle is faced with a crisis of her own. The story line is simply an excuse to namedrop the various historical highlights of the Harlem Renaissance: Countee Cullen, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Savoy, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Marcus Garvey. But for newcomers to the period, this will serve as a taste of this rich period in American history. (Fiction. 6-9)