DEAR TBR:
This is the year’s first novel-in-verse that I’ve read – and boy, does it shine.
The year is 1963 and fifth grader Cooper Dale is not looking forward to her school year. She has The Mean Teacher, and she’s dreading dealing with Ms. Keating, whom everyone says is just terrible. Cooper hates being the only Colored girl in her class, and hates how everyone looks at her when the history lesson is on slavery. Only the summer before, four girls only a little older than she is were killed in a church bombing by the Klan. The world seems full of scary, mean white people who hate her for being the color she is, and it’s dispiriting and exhasuting. What makes it all worse is a boy named Wade Carter, because Wade just can’t seem to leave Cooper alone. He is a bully, and his bullying is almost always racial in nature, taking the form of microaggressions that are not terribly micro, when taken together. Wade wears Cooper down. She loves her family, loves their gatherings, and otherwise loves her culture, but at school, she dearly wishes that she were white and could blend into the crowd.
Cooper is a worrier, and like many kids in early middle grade, though her worrying is part of her growing up and growing to see adults – and the larger world – as entities separate and with their own backstories, those worries sometimes consume her. She worries about her parents, and wishes they didn’t have to work so hard. She worries about disappointing them, and worries about seeming likeable. She worries that her siblings and cousins and extended family will be ashamed of the way she thinks and feels – and sometimes acts. Cooper feels like it’s harder to be herself – whoever that is – because her parents have told her repeatedly that she needs to “shine” in all that she does. To Cooper, that means that she should make straight A’s. She struggles with this. More, as Ward’s pestering gets under her skin, Cooper struggles with her behavior, earning herself a smack with a ruler from her scary teacher, her parents’ disappointment, and worse – her own. Why can’t this year be easy? Though Cooper’s dearest wish is to be just treated like everyone else, that’s never going to happen for the lone Black girl in a white-dominated school in 1960’s America. What Cooper finally determines is that her only option to counteract her frustrations are to shine, like her mother says she should. She’ll be so good that no one can ignore her. Cooper asks the input of her older siblings, and her cousins on how they succeed and deal with things, and vows to make her shine brighter. Ward Carter’s family hiring her mother as household help while Mrs. Carter is ill IMMEDIATELY makes that 1000% harder.
Still, as the school year goes on, through its ups and downs, Cooper begins to faintly understand that what she really should be looking to be is radiant – not just shiny on the outside, but radiating light and goodness and kindness from the inside that isn’t just external polish. And when real-world trouble touches their school community, Cooper finds out that radiance can’t be easily extinguished.
This book is accessible in terms of having short, spare poems, tons of historical references, from the Kennedys to Crayola’s “flesh” tone’s shift to peach, Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles, and a classmate whose interest in African culture and language really reflects the shift to the nascent 60’s attitudes of “Blackness” as divorced from the outdated terms “Negro” and “Colored.” Cooper is a young, but thoughtful fifth grader, and the novel takes the far-ranging themes of racism and prejudice and recolors them through the lens of forgiveness, family, and community. No one is perfect in this book – but no one and nothing is irredeemable, even bullies. Vaunda Micheaux Nelson subtly weaves a steady emotional pulse of a coming of age book with the everyday banalities of the fifth grade to create a quiet but memorable novel in verse that has a lot of heart.
Fresh onto the TBR:
- Somebody’s Daughter, Ashley Ford
- The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho
- The Tribulations of Ross Young, Supernat PA, A.J. Sherwood
In a world that seeks to dull us, may we ever be the radiance that it needs. Stay reading!
Still A Constant Reader