In Kekla Magoon’s new YA novel, Light It Up (Henry Holt, Oct. 22), 13-year-old Shae Tatum, a special needs black girl, is shot and killed by a white police officer in the fictional neighborhood of Underhill. With remarkable fluidity, Magoon introduces a circumstance so familiar that one might expect a kind of morbid fatigue; instead readers are ensnared from the first of many powerful vignettes.

In 2014, Magoon published another novel set in Underhill. After Trayvon Martin was killed, she began writing How It Went Down, a book that tells the story of Tariq Johnson, a black teen gunned down by law enforcement. While it would go on to receive a Coretta Scott King honor, Magoon recalls how difficult it was to get published it initially. “People thought, everybody’s talking about Trayvon right now, but is that even gonna be a conversation by the time your book comes out?” she recalls. Devastatingly, the book was released one month after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Magoon might not have known that a slew of extrajudicial killings would follow or that 2014 would see the Black Lives Matter movement begin, but she did believe that young adult literature could participate in what she calls “a general consciousness.”

“A lot of the narrative in How It Went Down was about the discussion of [the victim’s identity],” Magoon says. “In the case of Trayvon Martin, that question drove the narrative significantly, because there was this pressure to say...if he was up to no good then maybe what happened to him was deserved.” To that end, Magoon’s novel presented more than a dozen characters, all of whom are convinced of wildly differing narratives, forcing the reader to speculate as well.

Years later, Magoon has returned to Underhill in a story set two years later. In Light It Up, she imagines a different shooting affecting the same community. In writing about compounding tragedies, she shines a light on the way in which these recurring incidents have permanently and profoundly impacted the lives and psyches of black Americans.

From the killing, the narrative moves like a golden spiral, growing wider and wider as members of young Shae’s community find out about the murder and learn the victim’s identity. Using multiple points of view, which made the first novel so engaging, Magoon succeeds in crafting a living, breathing community, deftly exposing the way these tragedies gnaw at the back of the inhabitants’ minds. Before they know that it has happened again, they know that it can. Alongside them, readers experience the speed at which life and death collide in this oft-misrepresented world, and the triumph of the new novel might be that Magoon is able to illuminate the ecosystem of neighborhoods that often get flattened, reduced to street or city names, in ways that erase the inhabitants. Magoon showcases those closest to the death and the difficult task of living on.

In Light It Up, Magoon also undertakes a telling challenge. “I wanted to erase that piece of the narrative that is about...whether this person deserved to die in the way that they did,” she explains. “I wanted the conversation to be about what happens when this truly is a wrongful shooting.” Magoon decided to make the victim younger, even more vulnerable, and female. Sadly, she acknowledges, the result is not what one might hope. After all, black women—both young and adult—have also been brutalized by law enforcement. In the end, Magoon concedes, “Every effort that I try to make to say this is an innocent character, there’s evidence from society that [bias is] going to infect this experience just because this person is black.”

Despite her illustrious career, Magoon is all too aware of the tightrope walked by black authors who face skepticism over the necessity of continuing to write about what she calls “controversial shootings”—and who also receive more attention and support for novels that do. “While to me it’s vitally important that we continue to grapple with these issues...we’re always dancing on this line of needing to push the envelope of what [black authors] are allowed to publish.” Light It Up, with an ambitious style to match its searing commentary, does just that.

Bethany C. Morrow is the author of the novel Mem and editor of Take the Mic: Fictional Stories of Everyday Resistance.