Amazon.com Review
In a love story that glows like the many-colored silk skirt that is its symbolic centerpiece, Rita Williams-Garcia takes her place as a major young-adult novelist. This book, with a strong lyrical voice, fulfills the promise the author showed in her widely acclaimed earlier novel,
Like Sisters on the Homefront. With simplicity and a masterful control of pacing, Williams-Garcia builds a story that aches with the longing of two young lovers in a dance of tentative approach and defensive retreat, and eventual trust and healing.
Both Thulani and his girlfriend Ysa have an isolating spiritual wound. Ever since his mother suddenly returned to their Jamaican home to die four years ago, Thulani, 16, has withdrawn from the brother and sister-in-law who have raised him and who want to "man him up." Thulani spends long hours on the roof of their brownstone alone with his beloved doves, and school is to him "simply the sitting place." One day he hears a scream and looks over the parapet to see a young woman being raped in the alley below. He rescues her, covers her nakedness, and takes her home, although she fights him every step of the way. Later, fascinated by her proud rejection and grace, he begins to seek her out and follow her in her colorful clothes. "Every time you step out," he tells her, "a rainbow must die." At first she rejects him angrily because he has seen her shamed, but then she shares her name, Ysa, and her fierce ambition to become a textile designer. Little by little they begin to reach out (and then pull back again), to comfort and strengthen each other, and, finally, in a bittersweet ending, "to let go when it was time to let go." (Ages 14 and older) --Patty Campbell
From Publishers Weekly
Williams-Garcia (Like Sisters on the Homefront) paints a remarkably sympathetic portrait of 16-year-old Thulani, who came to Brooklyn from Jamaica with his mother and brother. As the novel opens, he is tending his beloved rock doves on the roof of his townhouse when he witnesses a rape. After he helps the young woman home, he cannot stop thinking of her; the author honestly conveys the mix of emotions the hero feels (sorrow, titillation, compassion, anger). Revisiting the scene of her assault, he discovers a rainbow-colored skirt that he knows must be hers, which he keeps and mounts on his bedroom wall. He follows her around until he works up the courage to talk with her, learns her name--Ysa--then falls in love with her. Through their budding relationship and her passion for life and her studies (textile design), Thulani works up the courage to accomplish his own goals, to break through his brooding silence and to accept his mother's death. Through Ysa's gradual willingness to trust Thulani, she helps him to live with uncertainty and sadness. The rape and, later, a lovemaking scene between Ysa and Thulani, are explicitly drawn, yet the manner in which Williams-Garcia contrasts the violence of one and the gentleness of the other underscores the myriad ways in which their relationship heals old wounds. With its layered yet understated language, including snippets of Jamaican and Haitian "patois" and complex yet truthful characterizations, this novel will hold the rapt attention of sophisticated readers. Ages 14-up.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
