A sleepover at Celia’s fancy suburban home releases a food of questions. How can Billie be Black but also White? How can she convince her best friend, Eutreece, that Billie hasn’t betrayed their friendship?
And when these kids get thrown together at a neighborhood barbecue, how can Billie and her friends accept one another long enough to solve the mystery of a neighbor named Neighbor, who has hidden something strange down by the canal? The answers to these questions challenge Billie far more than she ever thought possible.
Meredith Sue Willis grew up in West Virginia where her parents were both teachers. She has degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University, and her fiction has been published by Scribners’, HarperCollins, West Virginia University Press, Mercury House, Ohio University Press, and others.
Her book of literary short stories, ‘In the Mountains of America’, was praised in the New York Times Book Review as “a[n]…important lesson on the nature and function of literature itself.” Her novels for children and young people include ‘Billie of Fish House Lane’, ‘Meli’s Way’, ‘The Secret Super Powers of Marco’, and ‘Marco’s Monster’.
Her latest books include a book on writing, ‘Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel’; a collection of short stories, ‘Out of the Mountains’; and three novels: Their Houses’, ‘Soledad in the Desert’, and ‘Saving Tyler Hake’.
She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, and she lives with her husband in Orange, New Jersey where she keeps a four-season organic garden and is active in local racial integration politics as well as teaching writing.
Source: IBNA