Book review - Justice in a Bottle

Title: Justice in a Bottle
Author: Pete Fanning
Genre: realistic fiction
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Rating:

should get a kid thinking

Summary (provided by publisher): All thirteen-year old Nita Simmons has ever wanted is to be a journalist, but when she flubs a piece for her middle school newspaper, she becomes a laughingstock at school and risks losing her coveted membership to the Junior Journalists Club. Nita’s confidence is at an all-time low when Earl Melvin, her reclusive neighbor and the town’s most notorious criminal—picks that day to speak to her.
Mr. Melvin offers Nita a story—some old books he refers to as his memoirs. Nita can’t help but read the books, and what she finds is not violence but a tale of secret love and heartbreak in the Virginia back roads. Still dealing with her recent failure, Nita can’t believe that no one’s ever questioned such injustice in her own town. Sensing redemption, she dives into the research, getting to know the neighbor her mother warned her about.

My opinion: Middle grade fiction has been increasingly realistic regarding every day life during the Civil Rights Movement. While previously we'd seen books largely focused on lunch counter and bus protests, modern authors are looking more at other injustices especially regarding unjust laws that saw people imprisoned for years. Fanning explores marriage laws here, showing us all of the ways that lives were ruined by bad laws and narrow minds, some of which continued to be affected by public perception decades later. It's heavy, complex fare for a middle grade novel but Fanning handles it delicately. Not only is the vocabulary carefully selected for the target audience but the exploration doesn't go too deep. It's an introduction to historical (and by extension, current) inequalities in our justice system. The secondary elements of responsible journalism are worth discussing as well, as they may help young readers in understanding and evaluating the stories they read/hear. While the final scenes are a bit fantastic, it's overall a worthwhile read.
Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley