Night on Fire

By: Ronald Kidd

Narrated by: Robin Eller

Thirteen-year-old Billie Simms doesn't think her hometown of Anniston, Alabama, should be segregated, but few of the town's residents share her opinion. As equality spreads across the country and the Civil Rights Movement gathers momentum, Billie can't help but feel stuck - and helpless - in a stubborn town too set in its ways to realize that the world is passing it by. So when Billie learns that the Freedom Riders, a group of peace activists riding interstate buses to protest segregation, will be traveling through Anniston on their way to Montgomery, she thinks that maybe change is finally coming, and her quiet little town will shed itself of its antiquated views. But what starts as a series of angry grumbles soon turns to brutality as Anniston residents show just how deep their racism runs.

The Freedom Riders will resume their ride to Montgomery, and Billie is now faced with a choice: stand idly by in silence or take a stand for what she believes in. Through her own decisions and actions and a few unlikely friendships, Billie is about to come to grips with the deep-seated prejudice of those she once thought she knew and with her own inherent racism that she didn't even know she had.

©2015 Ronald Kidd (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Excellent story about difficult times in the 1960s

Night on Fire was an excellent story about 12 year old friends who witness a bus of Freedom Riders set on fire outside of Anniston AL. Billie makes another friend who is a black girl and the daughter of her family’s maid. They travel to Montgomery to visit a church where more freedom riders were coming. And Martin Luther King Jr was a person she met on this journey. Billie asks questions about why white people don’t like black people in the Deep South. She figures out how to deal with this as she goes on her adventure.

okay

Good but very long and boring blah blah blah blah blah but I think it was ok