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From award-winning writer Sophie Burrows comes a stunning debut about two lonely people lost in the big city. Crushing is a nearly wordless graphic novel about love, loneliness, and the struggle to connect that The New York Review of Books called “perfectly pitched for the current time of pandemic isolation” and “visual genius.”
Hey YA Readers!
It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day in America, and as I sat down to write the newsletter, I wondered where and how MLK has appeared in YA literature. I suspected there’d be more than a couple of fictional titles where MLK played a big role and a handful of nonfiction titles that go beyond his biography. Books that didn’t simply pull inspiration from his most famous speeches, stripping them of their context, their tone, their demands.
These exist, and we’ll get there, but in my research, something else emerged.
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Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story was a 16-page comic published and distributed in 1957 by Fellowship of Reconciliation, an organization focused on social justice and non-violent activism. It was the height of comic books and the height of the US government fearing what influence comic books had on young readers. Alfred Hassler and Benton Resnik wrote the text of the comic, while Sy Barry did the illustrations. Martin Luther King made small changes to the text itself, which followed the Montgomery bus boycott and the “Montgomery Method” of nonviolent protest that activists could use for social change. King approving of the comic’s publication.
Schools, churches, and social justice groups received 250,000 copies of the comic, and in later years, the comic was translated in numerous languages, including as recently as 2011.
John Lewis got his hands on Martin Luther and the Montgomery Story at the age of 18. It was 1958 and he was at a workshop that would help him prepare for a host of nonviolent Civil Rights protests. A few years later, Lewis and King would be guests of honor at the March on Washington in 1963, and they would march together from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
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Decades later, John Lewis wrote his own comic series, which has been tremendously influential in YA literature. The March trilogy is Lewis’s story of working toward Civil Rights and the first book in the series offers the moment when Lewis met King and how that helped sett his life’s work into deeper motion.
Lewis collaborated on March and Run, published posthumously, with Andrew Aydin. Aydin, who’d served as a member of Lewis’s campaign team, was the force behind the comic books coming to be when, in 2008, when he mentioned attending a comics event after Election Day. Aydin’s comment made a number of people laugh, but Lewis told everyone not to laugh, as it was a comic book — the above-mentioned Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story — which changed his life.
Aydin read the comic that night and himself inspired, encouraged Lewis to tell his own story in comics. It took time to come to fruition, YA readers now have a powerful comic showcasing the work of a legend of Civil Rights work, inspired by a comic. Aydin also wrote his masters thesis at Georgetown University on Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story and the tremendous influence that comic has had globally.
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March isn’t the only book with King influences in YA, though it may be the most direct. But we also see King in Nic Stone’s knockout debut Dear Martin, which follows Justyce McAllister, a young Black boy unjustly arrested and outcast by his peers. He looks to King for answers, beginning a journal to Dr. King in hopes to figuring out who he is and what he can do to make sense of his place in the world.
Though on the upper end of middle grade/lower end of YA, James L. Swanson’s Chasing King’s Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Assassination is a nonfictional account of the final hours of King’s life, including a close look at James Earl Ray, the racist prison escapee who assassinated the leader.
Swanson’s book, published in 2018, includes an introduction by none other than John Lewis himself.
Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!
As always, thanks for hanging out, and we’ll see you later this week for your YA book news and new books roundup.
Until then, happy reading!
— Kelly Jensen, @heykellyjensen on Instagram