L.S. Stratton: Sundown Girls
This event is free and open to the public, presented in partnership with the Frederick County Public Library. For accessibility requests, email info@curiousiguana.com at least two (2) weeks prior to the event.
About the book: In the tradition of Jordan Peele and Tiffany Jackson’s The Weight of Blood, a YA thriller about a Black teen whose fight for survival forces a small southern vacation town to face its dark history of racial violence.
When sixteen-year-old Naomi Ward and her family head to a secluded cabin in the Shenandoah Valley for summer vacation they don’t know the small, mountain town of Sparksburg, Virginia has a dark and twisted past. But when they arrive, Naomi can’t shake the feeling that something about Sparksburg just isn’t right—and it smells god awful, but for some reason Naomi is the only one who can smell the town’s stench. When she learns Sparksburg had once been a Sundown Town—a town where Black people weren’t allowed after sunset lest they be murdered—Naomi’s unease starts to make sense.
As Naomi digs more into Sparksburg’s violent origins, she finds herself haunted by the ghost of a girl, appearing nightly outside her window. Then she learns of two girls who’ve recently gone missing and suspects the past may still be present in Sparksburg and beneath the quaint façade of this tourist town is a palpable danger.
When Naomi decides to track the disappearance of the two girls herself, she becomes suspicious of a local man who has kindled fear in Naomi more than once. She soon learns he has a connection to one of the missing girls, and Naomi is certain he’s responsible for the disappearances.
When no one believes her, Naomi takes matters into her own hands. But to save the missing girls, she’ll have to finally face her own past trauma as a “missing girl” as she finds herself in a fight for survival.
Gripping and triumphant, L.S. Stratton tells an important and unforgettable story of racial reckoning inspired by historical events.
About the author: L.S Stratton is an NAACP-Image Award-nominated author and former newspaper crime reporter who has written more than thirty books under different pen names in just about every genre from thrillers to romance to historical fiction. She currently lives in Maryland with her husband, their daughter, and their tuxedo cat.
About the moderator: Charlene Thomas started writing when she was a little girl because she has a tendency to love telling stories just as much as she loves living them. She was sixteen when she wrote a manuscript that won the National Novel Silver Award from Scholastic Books, and went on to minor in creative writing at North Carolina State University. Charlene’s debut novel, Seton Girls, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was deemed “a timely examination of consent, power, and who owns the rights to the truth” by Kirkus Reviews. Her sophomore novel, Streetlight People, released November 2024 and was deemed “Ray Bradbury-esque” in Publishers Weekly’s starred review. Her third novel, It’s You Every Time, released May 2025 and has been featured in Kirkus Reviews and praised by Booklist and School Library Journal. When Charlene isn’t writing, she’s a marketer – having worked on brands at PepsiCo, Diageo, and Danone. She earned her MBA from Emory University, a Certificate in Digital Marketing from Cornell University, and a Certificate in Teaching Creative Writing from The University of Cambridge.
