Willie Tarrant turned twelve the day Billie Holiday died, in July 1959. That summer Willie had her first kiss, and Hurricane Erla shook her little town of Turner, Virginia, like a leaf. That summer there were also rumblings of a different kind-about integration. Two years after a battle to desegregate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, Turner's school system, and most of its social life, remained separate and unequal. Despite Little Rock's fearsome spector-rocks thrown, faces scratched, epithets shouted- the black parents of Turner gradually made up their minds that it was time for the system to change. and for Willie and her friends, set to go in the first wave, this meant a permanent breach of their world. Before this could happen, though, eight black college students, wearing suits and fresh haircuts, went into Woolworth's lunch counter, and nothing was the same again. 1959 is a masterful novel that brings to vivid life one of our nation's most important and difficult battles- and intimately reveals a girl, and a community, coming of age.