Truman Capote, who wrote In Cold Blood, and Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, were real-life childhood friends during the Depression in Monroeville, Ala. In his terrific, often very funny middle-grade novel Tru & Nelle, Coretta Scott King Honor author G. Neri (Yummy) reimagines this heartwarming, close-knit friendship in a small Southern community that drips with heat and Spanish moss. As Neri says in his acknowledgments, "The characters, the town, and the era were too rich, too colorful, and too outrageous to be contained by nonfiction."
Nelle, as Harper Lee was called, and Tru meet when he is seven and she is six. Nelle notices her new neighbor right away, with his white-blond hair and little white sailor suits. "Little Lord Fauntleroy" doesn't fit in with the barefoot rural kids, and boyish Nelle feels like an outsider as well. The two find common ground in their love of stories and playing detective, Sherlock Holmes-style, but make-believe gets real fast when their investigations of a local drugstore theft lead to a brush with the Ku Klux Klan. The author captures their frank, mostly friendly banter with humor and flair... and with genuine emotion, too. Nelle and especially Tru, who is abandoned by his parents, both experience the importance of "love kin," and how it's not always the same as "blood kin."
Older fans of To Kill a Mockingbird will be delighted to find themselves back in 1930s Alabama with Scout and Dill, but no familiarity with Mockingbird is required to appreciate this winning middle-grade novel. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness