Tru and Nelle

Truman goes to live with his much older cousins while his immediate family is falling apart. In the sleepy town of Monroeville, Alabama, during the Great Depression, Tru is an anomaly. He dresses peculiarly and is extremely well-read. When Nelle, the tomboy next door, comes by to check him out, they become fast friends, bonding over a love of reading, particularly Sherlock Holmes mysteries. They decide to look for mysteries in their own town, which leads them to find more intrigue then they could have imagined.

This book is a fictional account of the real-life friendship between American novelists Truman Capote and Nelle Harper Lee. The book reads like a classic. Although the middle-grade readers the book is intended for may not be familiar with the work of Capote and Lee, they will be touched by their resilience in the face of dark family and societal situations.

Nelle and Tru amuse themselves by listening in at the courthouse, and their adventures lead them into scrapes with bullies, the town boogeyman, and even the KKK. All of their encounters are filtered through their childish innocence, as they are eight and seven years old when most of the action takes place.