The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963

The Watson family of Flint, Michigan — Kenny, his older brother Byron, little sister Joetta, and their parents — road trip south to Birmingham, Alabama to drop Byron with Grandma for the summer. The first half of the novel is one of the funniest family comedies in middle grade fiction. Then they arrive in Birmingham in 1963, the summer of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four little girls. Curtis moves from comedy to history without a seam and the transition is the whole argument — these are real families, real children, real ordinary life, and then the bomb. The most important Civil Rights Movement novel for this age group and the one that most completely refuses to let history be abstract by grounding it in the specific warmth of one family before it arrives.