Jamila Minnicks' debut novel Moonrise Over New Jessup received the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Our First Impressions reviewers appreciated its nuanced look at the civil rights era, with 26 out of 29 readers awarding it 4 or 5 stars.

What the book is about:

Could separate be equal? This striking picture of the civil rights movement, from a Southern Black perspective not so far included in the mainstream white-dominated narrative, raises that question through the compelling emotional struggle of Alice Young, who flees a plantation-minded, nominally integrated and repressive rural Alabama, hoping to find her sister in Birmingham, but ends up in the prosperous all-Black town of New Jessup, where she finds dignity, opportunity, love and hope … citizens fear integration will destroy their freedom to be left in peace, to flourish … though they are still ...