A National Book Award nominee in 1975, Ludell is the first book in a groundbreaking trilogy about a young African American girl growing up during the 1950s in a small Georgia town. Ludell Wilson is a wisecracking bookworm and burgeoning writer who adores her best friend Ruthie Mae, her loving—but strict—grandmother, and everything about growing up. (Including her first pair of blue jeans, and her first boyfriend.)

But in the still-segregated South, Ludell‘s warm community exists side-by-side with poverty and injustice. Wilkinson’s bold, funny narrator, whose story continues in Ludell and Willie and Ludell‘s New York Time, shows us an America that is also changing…just not fast enough.