The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones is a story about friendship, family, and growing up. It is also, first and foremost, a story about race. It's a story about the struggle that it was and is to be black in America. And because that is a hard thing, this story deals heavily with racism in the attitudes and languages of certain characters.
In this book, white characters use racial epithets such as nigger to refer to black characters; this was not a language choice that I made lightly, but one meant to show the historical (and continuing) use of the word as a slur. If you are not black, please be thoughtful about the harm this language causes when used by non-black people, and use abbreviations like the n-word instead.
Sometimes, content like this is kept away from teens and younger readers because it might be hard to handle. It is hard to handle. But even though this book is fiction, anti-blackness is an undeniable reality. These characters have lived it; I've lived it, and maybe you have too. That's why it was important to me to tell this story as honestly as I knew how—in hopes that one person might read it and empathize with someone different from them, and that another might read it and feel seen.