Ghost Boys

YA novel about a Black teenage girl who witnesses her friend's killing by police — same subject matter, older audience, narrated from the living side

Verse novel told from the perspective of a boy on his way to commit a retaliatory shooting — ghosts also appear, spare form, Black youth and gun violence

Historical fiction about a Black family in Depression-era Mississippi confronting racial violence — earlier era, same fundamental questions about race and justice in America

Nonfiction companion — the historical argument that Ghost Boys makes through fiction, told directly for young readers

Two-narrator novel about police violence — one Black teenager beaten by a cop, one white teenager who witnessed it — the structural parallel to Jerome/Sarah

Adult literary antecedent — the dead haunting the living as argument about unresolved racial trauma; Ghost Boys is in direct literary conversation with Morrison's project, at middle-grade scale