It's 1954, and twenty-two-year-old Lucia Lafleur has always dreamed of following in her father’s footsteps. While sock hops and poodle skirts occupy her classmates, she dreams of bacteria and broken bones—and the day she’ll finally fix them. After graduation, a letter arrives, and Lucia reads the words she’s labored a lifetime to earn—"we are pleased to offer you a position at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine." But in the midst of her triumph, her fiancé delivers a crushing ultimatum: forego medical school, or forego marriage. With fractured hopes, she returns home to Louisiana, expecting nothing of the summer of '54 but sweet tea and gumbo while she agonizes over her impending choice. There, she unexpectedly befriends Nicholas, a dark-skinned poet whose dignity and intellect are a salve to her aching heart. Their bond, initially forged from a shared love of literature, soon blossoms into something as bewitching as it is forbidden. Yet her predicament deepens when a trivial misunderstanding between a local white woman and a black man results in a brutal lynching, and the peril of love across the color lines becomes chillingly real. Now, fulfilling her lifelong dream means relinquishing her heart—and escaping Louisiana alive.
Author
Shaylin Gandhi first fell in love with love stories at the age of ten, when she started stealing grown-up books off her mother’s bookshelf. By twelve, she’d perfected the art of reading under the covers by flashlight, and in high school, she attempted her first novel. She now writes from the mountains of Golden, Colorado, where she lives with her husband, identical twin daughters, and two scruffy rescue dogs. When not finagling words onto paper, Shaylin can be found hiking, biking, scheming up ways to add another stamp to her passport, or ingesting enough coffee to power a small city.
