Sundown Girls

About this book

In the tradition of Jordan Peele and Tiffany Jackson’s The Weight of Blood, a YA thriller about a Black teen whose fight for survival forces a small southern vacation town to face its dark history of racial violence. When sixteen-year-old Naomi Ward and her family head to a secluded cabin in the Shenandoah Valley for summer vacation they don’t know the small, mountain town of Sparksburg, Virginia has a dark and twisted past. But when they arrive, Naomi can’t shake the feeling that something about Sparksburg just isn’t right—and it smells god awful, but for some reason Naomi is the only who can smell the town’s stench. When she learns Sparksburg had once been a Sundown Town—a town where Black people weren’t allowed after sunset lest they be murdered—Naomi’s unease starts to make sense. As Naomi digs more into Sparksburg’s violent origins, she finds herself haunted by the ghost of a girl, appearing nightly outside her window. Then she learns of two girls who’ve recently gone missing and