THIS IS AN ADVANCE READING COPY

Jessa is a different person when she returns to her hometown.

The integrated schools in Oregon allowed her to form a friendship with a Black girl, and now she sees the local Jim Crow practices in Tennessee with new eyes. Supported by her Oregon relatives, she becomes an advocate not only for the inclusion of music throughout the school system of Radford, but also for friendships that cross racial lines. While she becomes a gadfly to the school board, her interactions with other members of her town precipitate crises that uncover support for her position as well as staunch opposition.

In the South, and also in the rest of the country, a long road stretches from the 1950s to the present, and we must judge how well we have lived up to the vision that Jessa’s discovery of interracial friendship revealed to her.