Ludell

A National Book Award nominee in 1975, Ludell is the first book in a groundbreaking trilogy about a young African American girl growing up during the 1950s in a small Georgia town. Ludell Wilson is a wisecracking bookworm and burgeoning writer who adores her best friend Ruthie Mae, her lovingbut strictgrandmother, and everything about growing up. (Including her first pair of blue jeans, and her first boyfriend.)

But in the still-segregated South, Ludells warm community exists side-by-side with poverty and injustice. Wilkinson’s bold, funny narrator, whose story continues in Ludell and Willie and Ludells New York Time, shows us an America that is also changingjust not fast enough.