Welcome to our first February Weekend Picks for 2025! This month, our Weekend Picks are written by SUNY Oswego professor Sarah Fleming. She begins the month by suggesting The Color of a Lie by Kim Johnson as the next YA novel we all should read.
 Sarah Fleming | Sarah Fleming is an assistant professor in the Curriculum & Instruction department at SUNY Oswego in upstate New York. A former high school English teacher for twenty-one years, she now teaches courses in English methods, literacy, and young adult literature. Sarah particularly enjoys reading and teaching about texts that can be used to forward antiracist and antibias teaching, and she engages in research that looks to support teachers in their redesign of ELA curriculum for such efforts. |
The Color of a Lie by Kim Johnson
 Author Kim Johnson | “‘Welcome to the neighborhood. It’s a great community. Your very own American dream.’ It was the Levitt & Sons jingle I despised. Because for us it was a dream deferred.” Most teens aren’t happy to have to move and start over in a new town, and Calvin is no different - he is not thrilled about his family’s move from Chicago to their new home in Levittown, PA. And what looks like the perfect, suburban community with its manicured lawns and pristine schools holds a darker truth. ‘The neighborhood was just like the Levitt & Sons ads: affordable assembly-line-made homes that, from above, looked like perfectly carved-out squares for blocks. To people in Levittown, this was the American dream. But to me, this was a delusion.” Because for Calvin, it’s different. Calvin’s family is Black, passing for white. |
| The Color of a Lie by Kim Johnson (author of This Is My America and Invisible Son) follows Calvin as he tries to settle into his new Levitt & Sons (of historical fame for building whites-only housing) neighborhood and the accompanying all-white school. As he meets other teens in the neighborhood, he faces the uncomfortable reality of trying to hide who he is in order to protect his family’s safety. While Calvin works to hide his real identity at school and in his neighborhood, he looks for ways to feel normal, such as reaching out to his estranged brother Robert who teaches nearby at a music school. He comes to know Lily Baker, the first Black student to insist on her right to attend Calvin’s all-white high school. But Calvin also takes a job working for Vernon Realty, the company that manages the homes for Levitt & Sons, and he soon discovers more to the town and its inhabitants that he was ready to know. |  |
This historical fiction takes the reader into the dark reality of 1950s redlining and the racist resistance to school integration, but does so in a way that it clearly connects to the modern reader’s understanding of race and racism. The Color of a Lie would be an excellent text for use in the classroom when studying the historical practice of redlining, discrimination, and restricting Black families from buying property or accruing generational wealth. It’s an excellent read, provocative and thoughtful - and readers will be swept up in the mystery Calvin discovers.
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