An interracial friendship between two teenage girls goes tragically wrong in this powerful historical novel set in the Jim Crow South.
For Lamb follows a family striving to better their lives in the late 1930s in Jackson, Mississippi. Lamb’s mother is a hard-working, creative seamstress who cannot reveal she is a lesbian. Lamb’s brother has a brilliant mind and has even earned a college scholarship for a black college up north– if only he could curb his impulsiveness and rebellious nature.
Lamb herself is a quiet and studious girl. She is also naive. As she tentatively accepts the friendly overtures of a white girl who loans her a book she loves, she sets off a catastrophic series of events that pulls in her mother, charming hustler uncle, estranged father, and brother and ends in a lynching.
Told with nuance and subtlety, avoiding sensationalism and unnecessary brutality, this young adult novel from celebrated author Lesa Cline-Ransome pays homage to the female victims of white supremacy.
My Review:
Thank you, NetGalley and Holiday House, for letting me read this. I literally could not put this book down. I had so many different emotions reading this story, and to realize that Lamb was a real person and a lynching victim is devastating. This book sent me down a rabbit hole of wanting to know more about lynching victims and plan a visit to Montgomery to The Legacy museum. For Lamb was one of my top reads of 2022.
About the Author:
Lesa Cline-Ransome is an American author of picture books and middle-grade novels, best known for her NAACP Image Award-nominated picture book biography of Harriet Tubman Before She Was Harriet and her middle-grade novel Finding Langston.
