For Black Girls Like Me: A Review and a Giveaway

In 2018 I read Nancy Johnson's article on Writer Unboxed encouraging writers to figure out what their novel's big question is. I saved it on my desktop and went back to it several times as I wrote Half-Truths. That question is in my mind and shaping the sequel.

So, it's no coincidence that after I finished reading For Black Girls Like Me (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019) by Mariama J. Lockington one of my thoughts was, "What is the big question this book answers?"

I don't know if Ms. Lockington has this in her mind when she wrote this middle grade book, but my question for this book would be, "What does a black girl experience who was adopted into a white family and never knew her birth mother?"

REVIEW

Using free verse poetry and poetic prose, the novel provides powerful insight into eleven-year-old Makeda June Kirkland's reality. Readers are immersed into the life of a girl whose hippie mother named her after an Ethiopian girl who died in a famine. Makeda's response: "I like Keda for short. I am not a dead girl." (p. 8)

The book opens with Keda, her older sister Eve, and her used-to-be-concert-violinist mother driving across country to New Mexico to meet their father who has taken a job as the principal cellist in the New Mexico Symphony. "Mama is up front with one hand on the wheel. Her violin in the passenger seat. The neck tipped down like a bottle being emptied into the seat." (p.3) This image poetically foreshadows  Mrs. Kirkland's battles.

Music, according to their father, is their legacy. Forced to play piano, but loving singing more, Keda wonders if she sounds like gibberish when she sings since her father outlaws the gibberish of  rap, hip-hop, and R and B. Keda's constant question is, "Where do I belong?" 

I love Ella and Billie Holiday and oh I just can't get enough of Nina Simone. These women sing and I feel like they are talking to me. Like we are speaking the same language. Like they know what it is to feel loved and lonely all at the same time. (p. 18) 

Although Keda realizes her parents love her, that knowledge doesn't stop her from wondering about her birth mother. "Even though these days I can't help feeling like I'll never be whole. That somewhere out there is a woman with my face. Another mother. Missing me the way I miss her." (p. 33)

Keda's voice is in the songs she makes up. 

.... I try to imitate different instruments with the sound of my voice. I don't sing any real words. I just open myself to the sounds and sing what I feel. I close my eyes and sway back and forth. I like to think about notes as colors and shapes. I like to swish the notes around in my mouth. Taste them on my tongue. Then I try to fill the whole world with my breath. With my sound.

In Albuquerque, Keda misses her best friend Lena (who is Haitian and was adopted by a white family) and has problems at her new school. Although Keda is used to people staring at her parents and then at her, trying to figure out where she came from, this time it is particularly painful. A teacher assumes she is from Africa, a fellow sixth grader calls her the N-word, and Keda's fragile new world breaks apart.  

A brief stint of homeschooling is followed by a disastrous summer. Her father goes on tour, her mother pulls away from the girls and into her own world, and Keda stops hearing from Lena. In a manic turn of events, her mother suddenly decides to take the girls on a trip to Colorado which ends in her attempted suicide--for which Keda blames herself. 

The end of the book is a symphony of clashes between the sisters that climax with new empathy and forgiveness. The ways in which the family pulls together after Mrs. Kirkland's hospitalization are painful, tentative, and yet authentic. 

I loved one of the final scenes when Keda's mother's violin-playing invades Keda's dream--and she realizes that it's not a dream. After her mother ends her impromptu concert, the two speak honestly about her mother's mental illness and her mother suggests that Keda take formal voice lessons. That night Keda sleeps better than she has in months. In the morning her fantasy friends who she calls the Georgia Belles, sing their last song to her ending with:

Peachy girl

You are ripe

You are

Your own magic

You don't need us to be free

All you need is a song

Diddlee-do-ee 

So I fling my blinds open, I open my mouth. I smear my ripe voice all over the morning. And let it ring. (p. 316)

GIVEAWAY

I am giving away my autographed copy of this book. If you are interested in receiving it, please leave me a comment (with your email address if you are new to my blog) by November 14. Want an additional chance? Post this on your social media of choice or start following my blog. Please let me know what you do and I'll add your name twice. Continental United States only. 

Cleo Edison Oliver in Persuasion Power: A Review and Giveaway

Cleopatra Edison Oliver is a fifth grade force to be reckoned with. Her superpower is the art of persuasion and she is convinced that she can not only create and market personalized hair clips ("Tell the world who you are!") to every girl in her grade, she's sure that her idol, talk show host, Fortune A. Davies, will endorse her. Following the pervious book, CLEO ADDISON OLIVER: PLAYGROUND MILLIONAIRE, PERSUASION POWER by Sundee T. Frazier (Scholastic Books, 2017) will appeal to 4th-6th grade girls.  

In one of the initial scenes Cleo's teacher, Mr. Boring, rebukes her for not focusing on their language arts lesson. Cleo admits that she can't imagine how metaphors or similes could be useful. Mr. Boring points out she used a metaphor in the ad copy for her passion clips. Like an inside joke, for the rest of the book Sundee Frazer sprinkles flavorful similes and metaphors into Cleo's thoughts and speech. For example, when Cleo thinks about another girl who became quickly popular she thinks, "The girl was all whipped cream and no pudding." 

Although this is a book about how Cleo translates her passion for hair clips into big sales, it is equally about Cleo wanting to find her birth parents. 

Her parents loved her. A lot. And yet lately she'd felt a growing desire to know more about her birth parents. To have a relatives list of her own. To see herself in her family. To have some clues about what she might look like all grownup. (p.73)

The author uses an apt simile to describe Cleo's feelings about her adoption: 

She had her parents. But something else--a gnawing, like hunger, except it wasn't in her stomach--told her that something was missing. She just wanted to know: Did they [her birth parents] remember her, wonder about her too? (p.82)

Cleo comes up with a foolproof plan to find her birth mom. She'll become a "kidpreneur" on Fortune's show, her birth mom will see her and contact her. When her mother warns against getting her hopes up too high, 

Cleo lets the words slide off her like grease on a non-stick pan. She was a seed in dirt, a dog chasing a scent, a dentist with a scaler! Nothing--not even her overly cautious mom--could stop her from trying to reach Fortune. (p.107)

Despite anxiety over meeting her birth father, she tells him, "I'm a girl with big dreams who won't let anything stop her. I may be young, I may be small, but I'm as persistent as the Itsy-Bitsy Spider." Her birth father gets a funny look on his face and she's worried that she said something wrong until he says, "That's exactly how I was when I was your age."

Suddenly, she was flinging her arms around his middle and hugging him as hard as she could. His arms hovered above her, then slowly he embraced her, ...and the feeling of her birth dad's arms around her mingled together and became a memory she would never forget--a coin in the piggy bank of herself that she would never, ever spend. (p. 228)

And even though Cleo never appears on Fortune's television show, the ending leaves the reader with a satisfied smile. I have just two points of critique. As much as I enjoyed this fast-paced contemporary novel, I would have liked if better if Caylee, Cleo's "business partner" was a little more developed and provided more push-back. It seemed as if Caylee was always hard at work creating the passion clips and worried over Cleo taking on more orders than they could manage--but there didn't appear to be consequences of Cleo's choice to turn over the majority of the "manufacturing" to her best friend. Similarly, Cleo spends a lot of class and homework time daydreaming about her business passions without any  consequences to her grades. 

This book will entertain the lower middle grade crowd and I have a paperback copy to give away. (My apologies in advance; the book arrived from the publisher with creases in the cover.) Leave me a comment by May 26 and your email address if you are new to my blog, and I'll enter your name in the giveaway. It would be a great book for your daughter, granddaughter, or to add to your classroom library.