A Thousand Never Evers

A Thousand Never Evers, a debut novel by Shana Burg, creates a convincing portrait of the South during the Civil Rights Movement. The book follows a year in the life of Addie Ann Pickett, a girl on the verge of her early teens in Kuckapoo, Mississippi in 1963. Addie Ann goes through some of the biggest changes of her young life just as the whole world around her is changing. On the one hand, she's an ordinary girl: she babysits, she enjoys school, and has crushes. On the other hand, everything Addie Ann knows about her world is crashing down as she begins to understand more about what is really going on (in her family and in her town), her place in history as she forms her own opinions and takes personal action. Addie Ann's voice is convincing and compelling, and her story provides an important perspective on the impact of tremendous social changes occurring in the South during the early 1960s.

Author Shana Burg's father was a civil rights attorney, and she grew up hearing stories about Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the March on Washington. Mining those stories, as well as conducting a fair amount of research and drawing upon her experiences as a teacher, paid off. Addie Ann is a courageous and memorable character--one with whom younger readers should be able identify. Her experiences can truly give readers a sense of what it might have felt like to live in those historic times. (Ages 9-12) --Heidi Broadhead

Shana Burg’s debut novel, A Thousand Never Evers, was inspired by her father’s role as a lawyer in the civil rights movement. To write this novel, she conducted scores of interviews, read old newspapers and magazines, listened to oral histories and the blues, memorized endless gardening facts, hired her former middle school students to edit her manuscript, and baked butter bean cookies. Shana lives with her family in Austin, Texas.