This book is twenty years old? How is that possible? It's Brooklyn and a schmancy private school, presumably in the 1990s-ish in Manhattan, and boy gets girl, only boy is Black and girl is Jewish, and that doesn't always go well.
Jeremiah, who goes by Miah, is the son of a successful filmmaker and a novelist, who are recently separated (or divorced). He's one of a few Black kids at Percy Academy, and he plays basketball, so people probably assume he's on scholarship. Miah's friends in Brooklyn are Black, he's lived a life among Black artists and intelligentsia, and hasn't had to confront race and whiteness despite his father's
Miah, you're a black man. You're a warrior.
talk. Dating a white girl has a way of changing that.
Ellie is a much-youngest child, perhaps a surprise, who calls her mother by her first name out of protest for her mom refusing to call her by her preferred name or for another reason that calls Marion's deserving of respect into question. In our introduction to Ellie
It rained the afternoon I met Jeremiah. A hard, heavy rain that would last for four days. I walked home slowly in it, an umbrella I had bought on the street for three dollars barely keeping the rain off my back.
we might get the idea that there will be challenges she's not prepared for. Be warned: same goes for the reader. I'm not saying don't read it, though. As always, Jaqueline Woodson is a poet-novelist who can do beauty and pain at the same time.