Sandy's in the fifth grade when he's forced to sit on the back row away from his white classmates and denied entry to a new amusement park. His grandmother, who is raising him alongside his mother and aunt, tells him that love is the only thing to make room for in his heart.

But it's Sandy's discovery of literature that inspires him to continue his education and make sense of the unjust world he inhabits in the debut novel from one of the foremost pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance.