Here, Johnson pens a love letter to the healing power of music, enduring friendship, summertime love stories, and hard-won resilience. Underlying these strengths are the looming specters of revenge porn and fatal gun violence. Johnson’s strengths are on full display in snappy dialogue that sings, heart-stopping romance, and realistically flawed Black teen characters learning from their mistakes, one by one. A week from reluctantly starting her freshman year at Indiana University, Toni has come to Farmland to find her real purpose and rediscover the music she lost when her dad died, but what she finds is Olivia.

Toni, a Farmland regular since childhood, is returning for the first time since the untimely death of her tour manager father eight months prior. Prone to falling in love at the drop of a hat, Olivia promises her ride-or-die bestie that this festival weekend will be crush-free-but then she meets 17-year-old Toni Foster. Packed with irresistible romance and irrepressible heart, bestselling author Leah Johnson delivers a stunning and cinematic story about grief, love, and the remarkable power of music to heal and connect us all.Johnson’s ( You Should See Me in a Crown) sophomore work sees chronically heartbroken 16-year-old Olivia Brooks fleeing Indiana to Georgia’s Farmland Music and Arts Festival to outrun the painful betrayal of her latest ex-boyfriend. As they work together, the festival becomes so much more complicated than they bargained for, and Olivia and Toni will find that they need each other, and music, more than they ever could have imagined. When the two arrive at Farmland, the last thing they expect is to realize that they’ll need to join forces in order to get what they’re searching for out of the weekend.

Unsure about who she wants to become and still reeling in the wake of the loss of her musician-turned-roadie father, she’s heading back to the music festival that changed his life in hopes that following in his footsteps will help her find her own way forward. Toni is one week away from starting college, and it’s the last place she wants to be. A crush-free weekend at Farmland Music and Arts Festival with her best friend is just what she needs to get her mind off the senior year that awaits her. But after the fallout from her last breakup has left her an outcast at school and at home, she’s determined to turn over a new leaf.

Rise to the Sun by Leah Johnson