A Summer of Kings by Han Nolan is a truely memorable, inspirational, and fantastic story. The story is set in the summer of 1963 during the Civil Rights Movement. The main character is Esther Young, a rich white girl in New York. For the first time she's had in awhile, she's looking for a real summer without tutors, an adventure, and he arrives in the form of 18-year-old King-Roy Johnson, a black boy from the South on the run from an accused murder. Esther is just looking for romance, but what she gets is a lot more. Her family, a family of geniuses and much talent, like putting her down because she's not like them. But through King-Roy, her best friend Pip, and the teachings of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., she learns to be the change that everyone needs. While King-Roy becomes angrier and becomes deeply involved in the Islam Nation, hating the "blue-eyed white devil", Esther finds solace and comforts in the nonviolent practices of Ghandi and MLK. In the end, she changes her friends' and family's outlook on herself so that they, too, end up seeing her for who she is: a girl on a mission to change the world for better.

 

A Summer of Kings was an amazing book. It pulled together history, a girl with no identity of her own, an angry boy hurt by nonviolence and furious with the "white devil", and a whole wacky assortment of "superior" people living under on large roof. I loved the book because it was real. The whole time I was reading it, I had to keep reminding myself that Esther and King-Roy weren't real, but there were many out there exactly like them.

 

I would recommend this book to any student in high school, but mostly, to any one interested in the civil rights movement and the people who were never named, but kept the movement going.