A Yellow Watermelon

In Ted Dunagan's third young adult novel, boyhood friends Ted and Poudlum, a white boy and a black boy who live in the rural segregated South of the 1940s, find their fishing trip interrupted by a Ku Klux Klan meeting. The boys accidentally learn the identity of key Klansmen. Discovered, they escape down the river but only to swim into the arms of more trouble. Dunagan's storytelling gifts make this an engaging read. Ted and Poudlum's escapades test their resourcefulness and challenge their awakening moral selves, as they come to understand the injustice of the time in which they live. Being a kid was never better than when Ted Dunagan imagines it. And the imagining was never better than in Trouble on the Tombigbee, the author's latest work.