Welcome back to Summerville Reads! Visit Main Street Reads, Summerville’s independent bookstore, your local library or “shop small” from your couch at a particular page we built just for the Summerville Reads selections at bookshop.org/lists/summerville-reads-as-seen-in-the-summerville-journal-scene. Read on.

YOUNG READERS

“Ahoy!” by Sophie Blackall (ISBN 9780593429396, Anne Schwartz Books $19.99/48 p.) is a thoroughly engaging, hilarious picture book that celebrates the joys of playing make-believe and hanging out with a parent — what better way to share reading with a child than to share an adventure!

You’ll join a child captain and parent first mate as they embark on a wild, high-seas adventure without leaving the living room. This imaginative picture book has glorious illustrations from a beloved Caldecott Medalist and New York Times bestselling creator.

Raise the mainsail! Batten the hatches! It’s time to set sail -- on the couch!

There’s a storm coming, and an adventurous child is ready to captain the ship. “Make haste and climb aboard,” they call out, “before you’re swept out to sea!”

Sea? What sea? The parent only tries to vacuum the rug, but the child is adamant. It’s not a rug — it’s the ocean. And that broom? It’s the ship’s mast. Soon enough, the child and parent are off on an imaginary nautical adventure.

Bonus: It’ll make you think of plenty more ways to create new adventures in your own house and let your child use their imagination to see the world right from the comfort of home.

HISTORICAL FANTASY

“The Familiar” by Lee Bardugo (ISBN 9781250884251, Flatiron Books, $29.99/400 p.)

We’ve been excited about this release from No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Leigh Bardugo since it was announced this past year, and it’s finally here, with gorgeous sprayed edges. It is also the most anticipated book of 2024 by The Washington Post, NPR, Goodreads, LitHub and many more.

Set in the Spanish Golden Age and the Spanish Inquisition, this book will bring some magic into your life. In a shabby house in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to improve the family’s social position. 

What begins as simple amusement for the local nobility takes a dark turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain’s king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England’s heretic queen – and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king’s favor. 

Determined to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the lines between magic, science, and fraud are never certain. 

But, as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition’s wrath. Luzia will have to use her wit and will to survive, even if it means enlisting the help of Guillén Santángel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both.

For fans of “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” and historical fantasy, this will provide 400 pages and many hours of pure fascination.

REAL HISTORY

“Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery” by Earl Swift (ISBN 9780063265387, Knopf Publishing Group, $32.50/432 p.)

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of “Chesapeake Requiem” comes this gripping work of narrative nonfiction. It tells the haunting and forgotten story of the mass killing of 11 Black farmhands on a Georgia plantation.

On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days, a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them, a deeper horror: all 11 had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths. As America was soon shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of Black men enslaved throughout the South in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War.

By turns police procedural, courtroom drama, and political exposé, “Hell Put to Shame” also reintroduces readers to three Americans who spearheaded the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely faced punishment for violence against their Black neighbors.

James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first Black leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, marshaled the organization into a full-on war against peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, a system where workers were compelled to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage had been outlawed by Congress in 1867.

Johnson’s lieutenant, Walter F. White, a light-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed Black man, conducted undercover work at the scene of lynchings and other Jim Crow atrocities, helping to throw a light on the violence and to hasten its end.

And Georgia Gov. Hugh M. Dorsey won the statehouse as a hero of white supremacists – then spectacularly redeemed himself with the “Murder Farm” affair.

The result is a window into history that remains relevant a century later as the nation wrestles with challenges in race and justice.

Shari Stauch loves all things Summerville and is a fierce champion of literacy in the Lowcountry. She owns Main Street Reads (115 S. Main St., www.mainstreetreads.com). An avid reader, author and publisher, she also serves on the boards of the Timrod Library, Summerville DREAM and on the literacy committee of Summerville Rotary. She can be reached at mainstreetreads@gmail.com.