Dear Denise: Letters to the Sister I Never Knew

"Lisa McNair recounts growing up in newly integrated Birmingham, Ala., after the notorious 1963 Ku Klux Klan church bombing that killed her sister Denise and three other Black girls. Lisa was born a year later, and her memoir imagines what it would have been like to have had a relationship with her big sister. The book is a series of letters to Denise describing how the McNair family endured, the ongoing fight against racism and Lisa’s own struggle to find her identity in a country changed by her family’s tragedy. This intimate historical reflection proves to be a cautionary tale about racial violence."