The beautiful cover of Karen Strong’s debut middle-grade novel, Just South of Home, captures only the surface of this Southern ghost story. The four black children on the cover look like they’re in search of something, and possibly a little creeped out, but that’s just one part of this dynamic tale.

Sarah Greene is stuck with her cousin Janie, who visits Warrenville, Georgia, every summer from Chicago, though this time she has to stay longer. Janie is “citified,” and, like many of her Northern counterparts, she has preconceived notions about the rural South (where Strong was born and raised). Bored with what she believes to be a backward, boring town and surrounded by a cast of characters she calls “country birds,” Janie entertains herself with a little bit of shoplifting and makes a visit to the site of a church that was burned down by the Ku Klux Klan during the Jim Crow era. The unsettled spirits known as “haints”—the Southern word for ghosts—in search of justice are reignited by this act, and Sarah recruits Janie along with a couple of other kids to help make things right.

The site of the crime and the details of it are drawn from Strong’s real-life experience, nurtured by a family of storytellers. “I’ve always been attracted to these Southern gothic ghost stories,” Strong says. “There was always someone who was wronged. The haints would be trapped, they would feel like the people who harmed them never got justice.”

The result is a ghost story with levity and down-home flair. Sarah and her brother Ellis deliver a bunch of brilliant one-liners like “snitches get switches,” referring to the branches that are often used for corporal punishment.

The ghosts of hate crimes past drive the plot, but there is also a light exploration of how communities and individuals cope, in the long term, with the trauma from racial terror. While Just South of Home doesn’t go into the historical details or context of lynching, the book’s contents have already acted as a kind of conversation starter, which Strong finds surprising and refreshing.

Just as surprising has been the cultural divide between readers familiar with spanking via the somewhat old-school and controversial use of objects like switches or belts and those who are horrified by reading it in a middle-grade novel. “A lot of nonblack people are really concerned about Mrs. Greene’s behavior, and some say there should be trigger warnings,” Strong says. “People outside of the community don’t really understand the switches.”

This is an indication of a bigger trend that has arisen because of the lack of diverse viewpoints and books offered by writers of color, Strong says. “There are people who say they can’t connect to the kids, in part because a lot of people are jarred by the way that characters interact with one another,” Strong says. “When people come to a book, they’re bringing their own experiences and their viewpoints. I always think it’s interesting when people say, ‘I can’t connect.’ Brown and black children for decades have been reading about people different from them, and they had to relate to those stories.”

While there has been some progress getting readers to be more receptive to #ownvoices material since Strong started writing toward publication in 2006, Strong says, “The strides have been great, it’s not just enough. I can count the black women writing Young Adult on one hand. There are five middle-grade debuts by black women this year; five in 2020. A lot of black characters are written by white authors. There’s still more to be done, and I’m not going anywhere.”

Joshunda Sanders is the author of the children’s book, I Can Write the World.