And eventually, one of these back-door transactions introduces Will to a black teenager about his same age and his little sister. Money is money, as far as he’s concerned. Will’s father outwardly toes the Jim Crow line, but he’s not opposed to serving black customers, despite the fact that it could get him into trouble if anyone found out.

After getting into some trouble, Will’s father makes him start working at the family victrola store. The city is deeply segregated and Will has little interaction with any black people except for the woman who works as housekeeper and cook in his family’s home. The other narrator is Will Tillman, who is also 17, but he’s living in 1921 Tulsa. The skeleton appears to be about 100 years old and the police don’t seem to care that much about figuring out who it belonged to or why they ended up below the floorboards of an old historic home, but Rowan can’t let it go and starts digging into the mystery. She’s seventeen-years-old in present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma and her summer takes a sharp detour from her plans on the first morning of vacation when the workers doing some renovation on her family’s property discover a skeleton. One of my all-time favorite books is The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had and this one seemed like it might be at least somewhat similar. It checked all sorts of boxes that interest me in a book: it’s a young adult novel, it has a mystery, there are two narrators, and it deals with race relations in America. Darcy’s Summer Reading Guide and the minute I read the description, I knew I wanted to read it. I first saw Dreamland Burning on Modern Mrs.

Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham