Leah Johnson recently published her eighth book, “Bree Boyd is a Legend.” This book was released on March 4 and takes place in the same universe as Johnson’s 2023 award-winning book, “Ellie Engle Saves Herself.”
Johnson is an Indiana native and owns a bookstore in downtown Indianapolis, Loudmouth Books. On March 8, Johnson and New York Times Bestseller Debbie Rigaud had a conversation at Loudmouth Books about Bree Boyd and Johnson’s experience writing about her. “Bree Boyd is a Legend” was dedicated to Johnson’s three sisters in part because the book talks about family dynamics and the struggle to adapt to new ones as Bree goes through middle school.
“In the acknowledgments it says, ‘At its core, this is a book about sisterhood, about the ways families, but particularly relationships between siblings, are complex and hilarious and powerful beyond explanation and reason,’” Johnson said during her book signing.
In addition to sibling relationships, Johnson highlighted Bree’s father in the book and his fixation on filling the mold of traditional “Black excellence.” Rigaud said she grew up in the world of respectability politics, where Black people especially had to dress, talk and style their hair a certain way in order to be taken seriously or seen as professional. Johnson said it was very difficult to balance out the pressure Bree’s dad put on her while also giving him enough redeeming qualities to make the story compelling.
“He’s just making bad choices because he thinks that respectability is the only way for this family to move up in the world,” Johnson said. “… He cares, but he’s so bogged down in this idea of Black excellence, and then Bree’s journey has to be, ‘Well, have you considered that you’re wrong? Have you considered that this isn’t what Black excellence looks like?’”
Beyond the regular struggles of middle school, Johnson said Bree also has to learn how to control her new telekinetic powers. Rigaud praised Johnson’s ability to include magic in a very realistic way.
“You have an amazing way to capture how it feels like to have power coursing through you,” Rigaud said. “When Bree then has this power I started to wonder, because there’s so much magical realism to it … I started to think maybe I could do this too.”
Johnson said she decided to have Bree competing for the national spelling bee because she was nerdy growing up. She said the highly competitive nature of spelling bees also allowed her to explore some of the anxiety that Bree felt not only as a seventh grader with telekinesis but also competing for a national title.
Throughout the process of writing and publishing “Bree Boyd is a Legend,” Johnson said it was rewarding to see her community support her and continue to grow. She said her books often center around young Black girls and empower them to be great.
“It’s beautiful to see my community expand past the group of people that I see every day,” Johnson said. “My actual community feels really big, you could see the way that the bookstore has reached into people’s lives and gives them something. I just made the space, and it was a lot of books, but the actual work of building community, like using the space to develop things is … all of us sort of buying into this idea that what we do is important enough to really commit ourselves to it.”
