Zora Neale Hurston - Girl Detective

The New York Times is reporting on a new book reimagining the canonical Harlem Renaissance writer as a girl detective.

From the piece...

The novel depicts Hurston as a bright, imaginative fourth grader, living with her family and friends in an all-black Florida town, around 1900. Zora, Carrie (the first-person narrator) and their friend Teddy try to figure out what happened when a man’s headless body is discovered by the railroad tracks.

“Fictionalizing Zora gave us creative freedom,” said Ms. Bond, a 31-year-old lecturer in composition and classics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who has an M.F.A. in creative writing.

Added Ms. Simon, 44, who writes under the name T. R. Simon: “We wanted to write a book that would help people fall in love with Zora. I wanted them to be able to see that bridge from childhood intellectual curiosity to adult production.”