Welcome to another session of Turning Pages!
Synopsis:Sophia’s moved to Montego Drive in LA with her lawyer father and her gorgeous mother, and her elder sister, Lily, who is going to college. With Montego Drive comes a new housekeeper, the disapproving Mrs. Baylor, and her handsome and much bragged-on son, Nathan. Sophie, going on thirteen next October, is trying to clutch every last day of her and Lily’s last summer at home together. Beautiful, brave Lily is going to Spelman in the fall, but before then, she’s trying to find her own feet, and branch out a bit from the family. She insists that Sophie branch out, too — after all, she’s going into a new high school, and it’s time for her to quit being so odd and bookish, and to get more friends than the little white girl across the street. But, Sophie’s happy being Jennifer’s best friend, and following where Jennifer leads. It’s easier than putting herself forward – after all, there are so many tiny pitfalls to actually admitting to herself that she wants things like to play with the other girls in the neighborhood, the ones who are quick to judge her, and turn their backs, because Sophie is Colored.
This is the rockiest summer in Sophie’s memory. Sophie’s parents are fighting — really fighting. Lily wants to go to UC Berkeley, even though the historically Black women’s college Spelman is her mother’s dream for her. Sophie wants to write a novel, or take the lead in a play, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else believes that she can do these things, not even her best friend. But her parents rocky marriage and Sophie’s own disappointments abruptly take a backseat to the happenings in downtown Los Angeles. An interaction with the police takes a turn for the violent, and suddenly a neighborhood called Watts is full of rioting, angry Colored people, burning trash and throwing bricks through windows. Racism has landed with an ugly growl into the American conversation, and Sophie’s world is unraveling. Is this how things will be, from now on? What does it mean, to be black and American? Is it possible to be those things, and a writer, and a regular girl, too?
Karen English leaves her readers with no easy answers, but takes an honest, heartfelt look at the complex realities of blackness in America.
Observations: IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS has an old-fashioned feel to it; English comes across stylistically like the greats from YA’s golden age; Paula Danziger, Norma Fox Mazer or Carson McCullers. The book is crammed with details from the time period and Sophie’s familial details are also almost overwhelming – which is par for the course for a slice-of-life novel from the golden age of YA lit. Sophie is like any other straight-speaking tween from the 1960’s, seriously observing her life and the lives of everyone around her, eavesdropping, listening on phone extensions, snooping through her father’s desk and her mother’s briefcase, and finding out waaaaay more dirt on everyone than she expected. The vaguely romanticized view of life Sophie is getting comes face to face with baseline microagressions and racism, and she is baffled and vaguely hurt and then slowly but surely learns what real hurt, institutionalized racism, and denial of basic human rights is all about. It is an awakening for both Sophie’s and the neighborhoods of Los Angeles; both personal and universal, and part of growing up as a young woman, and, in a broader sense, as a country.
Conclusion: While many YA books portray the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s as a neatly monolithic lock-stepped march through history and on Washington, the reality is that it was a messy, intensely personal awakening, as black people realigned what they’d been taught about themselves and their place in American society with a new reality of greater visibility and potential equality. While for some, this brave new world seemed suffused with opportunity, for others whose greater privilege had all along afforded them broader respectability among white Americans, this “movement” seemed foolish, dangerous and disturbing. Seen through a twelve-year-old’s unflinching point of view, IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS tells the story of the jagged truths which break in on one Los Angeles family’s smoothly suburban existence the summer of 1965, and strip away the lies about who they believe themselves to be.
I received my copy of this book courtesy of my agent, who thought I’d enjoy it. He was right. After July 11th, you can find IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS by Karen English at an online e-tailer, or at a real life, independent bookstore near you!
