Iris' frequent battles with her annoying sister and her parents' focus on the toddler are enough to make any older sibling roll their eyes and cringe sympathetically. Daniel's grief at the loss of his father is beautifully explored in his new resistance to basketball, a game he learned with his dad, and his attachment to his mother. Her descriptions of the crisp, winter cold and swirling snow are crystal clear in the reader's mind, and Iris' family meals are almost realistic enough to taste. Even with her straightforward style, Brown crafts a distinct and well-defined world. The prose is approachable and never flashy, allowing readers to get caught up in the characters and their struggles rather than adjectives and superlatives. All these troubles are woven together in a seamless story of friendship, family, and overcoming one's fears.

In her debut novel, Brown tackles a wide variety of nightmares, from unsettled ghosts to the horrors of segregation and the death of a parent. Could the spirits of the snow be real? Are they coming for Iris? Iris is beginning to suspect, though, that some of the superstitions she's heard from Daniel's eccentric grandmother, Suga, might be more than old wives' tales, and she can't help but hear Suga's haunting song in her mind: 'When you hear the winter wind/that's the sound of their screaming./That's when you'll know/spirits of the snow/are ready for their feeding.' It doesn't take very long before Iris' dreams-they must be dreams, right?-are filled with visions of a strange girl with black eyes. Iris finds that Avery's buried in a forgotten segregated graveyard, and decides that restoring Avery's cemetery and bringing their town's history of segregation to light might be the perfect way to get the recognition she deserves. When the first snow of the year falls one night, Iris and her best friend, Daniel, discover the abandoned grave of a girl named Avery Moore, who died in 1956 when she was only eleven. Her mother assures her that fame and praise aren't things she should seek out, but Iris can't help feeling like the whole situation is unfair.

Her teachers scold her for minor offenses, even when the popular white girls like Heather Benson are more deserving of their ire.

As one of the few African-American kids in her class, she wonders if her school intentionally excludes her from activities it certainly ignores the accomplishments of the step team she captains. Her parents are too busy with her little sister, Vashti, and they constantly command Iris to make accommodations for the four-year-old.

The Forgotten Girl by India Hill Brown