Light It Up

A white police officer shoots and kills Shae Tatum, an unarmed thirteen-year-old African American girl. Over the following weeks, the story follows the aftermath through many perspectives: Shae’s friends, community activists, a gang leader, college students, a public-relations worker assigned to the case, the officer’s young daughter, and others. The book is told in a sequence of vignettes, allowing people close to the tragedy and people at different distances from it to respond. Their accounts trace the effects of the killing across a community and its efforts to confront injustice.