THE PARKER INHERITANCE Review: It’s Time to Retire HUCK FINN

I grew up in the Deep South, about a ten minute drive from the North Carolina/South Carolina border. I later lived in Atlanta for almost ten years. I know the places in this novel. My childhood home sits on the state highway mentioned in Chapter 26.

And holy shit, I really, REALLY wish this novel had been part of the Language Arts curriculum when I was in middle school. I’m pretty sure no middle grade novels quite like this existed in the 90’s.

I’d planned to write my first book post through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, but in the time it’s taken me to sit down and write again, a terrifying deadly virus sweeping the globe has stopped dominating current event headlines. So in light of the long-overdue revolution happening across America (and the globe), and because I just finished The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson before reading it for a storytime, I’ll write about this one first instead.

Mostly, what I want to write is this: READ THIS BOOK. JUST READ IT, NO MATTER YOUR AGE. Go buy it (preferably from an indie bookstore, even more preferably from a black-owned indie bookstore) and read it right now. If you’re looking for new middle grade fiction by authors of color, featuring fantastic lead characters of color, I can’t think of a better place to start.

The story

Twelve-year old Candice Miller is not at all pleased to be living with her mother in her late grandmother’s house for the summer, stuck in a small town in South Carolina called Lambert. She misses her friends, her house, and her father, all of them back in Atlanta. Things start to look up a little, however, when she befriends Brandon–the shy boy across the street who devours library books as quickly as she does–and when she stumbles across a letter in the attic addressed to her grandmother. The letter is a challenge and a quest: full of puzzles and riddles about Lambert’s racist history. The person who solves the puzzles will earn the town of Lambert millions of dollars from a mysterious benefactor. It turns out that Candice’s grandmother, Abigail, the first black City Manager of Lambert, ruined her career by trying to solve the puzzle ten years before and was forced to leave town in disgrace.

From here the story takes off: Candice and Brandon work feverishly to solve the puzzle, trying to find the money and clear Abigail’s name. Hopping through the decades and told from multiple character perspectives, the novel slowly unfolds a story about racist oppression and violence in this small Southern town, and the ways that racism continues to threaten people of color in Lambert in the current day.

the babble

Varian Johnson has pulled off a marvel with this book. The publisher recommends The Parker Inheritance for ages 8-12, and while some eight year olds might struggle with the acts of the racist Lambert citizens detailed in flashbacks, the book feels age-appropriate to me.

[FROM HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. YE HAVE BEEN WARNED.]

Yet Johnson doesn’t pull any punches or sugar coat his topic: his novel tackles the ugliness and violence and mania of white supremacy head on, especially in the harrowing account of Lambert’s infamous 1957 tennis game and its violent aftermath. Readers will be terrified for Reggie and Big Dub and Siobhan — and they should be. What I love is that the novel doesn’t paint racism as a comfortably cut-and-dry topic, dividing the world into white supremacists of the 1950’s and everybody else. Chip, trying to be a progressive ally in the 1950’s, screws up big time and makes life harder for the very people he’s trying to help. (Oh, Chip. More on him below.) The high school vice principal adopts a racist attitude when he suspects and verbally attacks Candice and Brandon, simply for existing on school property after hours. Brandon’s older sister drives extra slowly because she is terrified of giving a cop any excuse to pull her over. The book points out that Lambert still has a very clear line between the black and white neighborhoods in town. The Parker Inheritance even addresses intraracial prejudice through the arcs for Reggie, Big Dub, and Adam Douglas.

And all this makes it sound like I’m describing a super dour novel, or an “issue” novel, but I’m not! It is sad and horrifying and suspenseful, but it is also fun, and funny, and immensely hopeful. We get to hang out with Candice and Brandon at the library while they talk about books. We get to watch Candice and Brandon counter homophobia with acceptance. We get to see these two amazing protagonists triumph. We get to solve the puzzle along with them. And — most unusually for a middle grade book full of suspense — we also grow to care for the adults in the protagonists’ world as well.

Literary legacy is a funny thing. The only book I remember reading during my K-12 years that addressed racism head-on was that stalwart classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Which, don’t get me wrong, is an excellent book. It’s a classic for a reason. And it’s also the subject of plenty of controversy these days when used as a classroom title.

I don’t believe in censoring books, or removing them from the public sphere. If you want your kid to read Huck Finn, go for it. Buy it or check it out from your local library. But great as it is, that novel about racism was written by a [brilliant] white guy in 1886. For so long, we didn’t have many other options.

The Parker Inheritance was written NOW, by an immensely talented author of color, and it doesn’t banish American racism to a comfortable past. It talks about slavery AND racism in the 1950’s AND racism now. It also talks about kids who love to read, and what it feels like to be a middle schooler navigating bullies and the social structure, and what it feels like to have your parents go through a divorce, and what it feels like to miss your beloved dead grandparent, and what it feels like to find a clever solution that the adults around you missed. It is beautifully and cleverly written, it is fun and unflinching at the same time. It will be an education for just about any middle schooler (or high schooler, honestly) who reads it.

Basically, there’s no real need to teach Huck Finn anymore, when we can teach books like The Parker Inheritance instead. In this case, it might be time to retire the classic and work on establishing a new classic.

rating

**** out of 4

random babble

• Oh man, Chip’s mistake with Reggie and the Cokes is SO UNCOMFORTABLE, folks. I cringed so hard I dropped the book. And that’s exactly how I should feel. That’s exactly the type of discomfort this book makes people like me sit with. Allies screw up, too. All the time.
• Honestly, I love the way that Chip’s arc is handled. He doesn’t get the girl. He accepts that. He helps the way he is needed. He may be clueless, but when everything is on the line, he does the work. And it sounds like he keeps doing the work for the rest of his life.
• I love the way that Reggie’s arc plays out as well, mostly. Definitely didn’t see that big twist coming. And I love that Siobhan calls him out on his shit when he finds her again. I’m not sure how I feel about how forgiving she is toward Lambert, but then again, I’m not the right person to pass any sort of judgement on that arc.
• Good lord, this book just packs in SO MUCH, all of it deftly handled. The many facets of racism. Bullying. Divorce. Coming out. Grief. And did I mention it also manages to be fun and enjoyable?
• For younger readers in that 8-12 category: don’t be fooled by Scholastic’s printing. They’ve tried to disguise how dense this book is by making it look the normal size as other middle grade novels, but I noticed that the font size and the line spacing are both smaller than usual.

Oh, and in case I didn’t make it clear how I feel about the topic: