The Parker Inheritance

The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson

As we grow older, disillusionment becomes an increasingly familiar feeling. Whether the revelations we confront are about our families, our identities and their worth, the history of our country, or a mix of all of these, few among us were told the whole truth about ourselves and the world around us as children, or had the resources at our disposal for discovering these truths on our own.

The idea of not having the proper resources for uncovering the truth never seems to cross the minds of Candice Miller and Brandon Jones, however. The joint heroes of Varian Johnson’s middle grade novel The Parker Inheritance, Candice meets Brandon when she moves into what was once her beloved grandmother Abigail’s house, right across the street from Brandon in the small town of Lambert. She and her mother are only there for the summer—giving the divorced but amicable parents some space as her engineer father works to remodel a smaller house for Candice and her mom in Atlanta—but Candice and Brandon are swiftly brought together as fast friends when they discover a mystery beneath their very noses.

Candice always loved and idolized her grandmother, but she never knew how Abigail Caldwell, the city of Lambert’s first Black city manager, resigned from her office in disgrace after an embarrassing scandal involving digging up the city’s tennis courts. When Candice and Brandon find a mysterious letter in a box labeled “Candice” in her grandmother’s attic—a letter that looks a lot like the beginning to one of the puzzle books that Candice so loves to read—they begin to think that there may be more to the story of Lambert, Abigail’s resignation, and the departure of one of Lambert’s respected Black families some 50 years ago.

Written in clean prose with carefully-placed allusions to other classics of mystery literature for youth—most notably The Westing Game—The Parker Inheritance builds a satisfy puzzle mystery without spending undue time getting gnarled in the details of the puzzle itself. Much more narrative attention is spent on sussing out the tensions and mysteries between the historical residents of Lambert itself. The book tracks back and forth between different historical periods—with these pages thoughtfully shaded in dark gray tones to clearly demarcate them from the present day passages—bringing vividly to life the way Lambert’s Black residents were treated by its white residents in the 1950s. Complete with a forbidden love story, a midnight tennis match between all-Black and all-white tennis teams, and a heart-pounding escape from a racist white mob bent on violence, these historical passages are anything but dry. Indeed, they are intense and at points harrowing, but young readers will certainly not feel like they are being protected from the truths of U.S.America’s history and present, as racist, misogynistic, and homophobic violence are all fearlessly brought to life. Johnson makes a point of digging in to complexities of identity that less honest writers might avoid: multiple storylines take on the material privileges and ethical pitfalls of racial passing and the intricacies of staying in the closet versus coming out as queer.

A book for book lovers and truth seekers, The Parker Inheritance is also a fun and engrossing puzzle book reminiscent of Chasing Vermeer or The Westing Game. What sets this book into a category of its own is the way it takes on the real world as the puzzling mix of truth, lies, and obfuscation that needs to be investigated through persistence, honesty, heart, and friendship.

Subjects this book includes which some readers may be sensitive to: Racism and racist violence, threats of misogynoirist violence, homophobic bullying.