TRUTH WITH A CAPITAL T

Sharing her Tweedle, Ga., grandparents with her newly adopted and only slightly younger Northern—and African-American—cousin is not what Caucasian narrator Maebelle had in mind for her summer. She’s still a bit ego-bruised from knowing that she’ll start middle school in a regular—not gifted-and-talented—class, and Isaac’s extraordinary competence on the jazz trumpet is hard to take. While Isaac and their musical grandparents plan a performance for the town’s Anniversary Spectacular, Maebelle grapples with her mixed feelings of protectiveness and resentment toward Isaac. A mystery about the closed-off wing in her grandparents’ inherited plantation mansion grabs her attention—one of the town’s most prominent 19th-century citizens seems to have figured in some kind of clandestine comings and goings. The somber acknowledgment of the town’s slave-holding past is contrasted with a present in which racism and bigotry are not unknown, but there are no easy villains, and Maebelle’s is not the only family where black and white come together. Lots of elements here, and most fit together smoothly and treat the nicely drawn cast of characters with depth and dimension. (Fiction. 9-11)