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.