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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
"The doctor say she see it every day, babies having babies." Fifteen-year-old Tasha Dawson narrates a tale of teenage motherhood in Porter's second adult novel (after All-Bright Court). Balancing her honor-roll grades with the perils of surviving inner-city Buffalo, N.Y., Tasha gives birth to Imani?a child conceived in violence and given a name that means "faith." . The young mother expresses a powerful, protective love for her daughter even as she herself negotiates her existence among drug dealers and bigoted authorities and explores her own adolescent sexuality. She struggles to understand her mother's new relationship with a white man; her own desires, shame and pride; and the nature of a God who is both merciless and loved. Just when Tasha appears to have found a place for herself with Imani and in school, her world is devastated by a flash of injustice that changes her life forever. Porter spins the tale in a series of flashbacks, telling Tasha's story in a nonlinear fashion and with a bold dialect, mirroring the survival strategies of indirection that Tasha employs in her complex navigation of young adulthood, motherhood and urban life. Porter is also known as a young-adult fiction writer (the Addy books in the American Girls series), and at times this novel slips uncomfortably into YA simplicity, especially in its resolutely uplifting final scenes, which offer an almost cloyingly spiritual happy ending to Tasha's complicated, earthbound story. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA-Imani's name means "faith," and her mother, Tasha, is a 15-year-old African-American high school honors student. Tasha's mother is emotionally distant and the teen resolutely turns away from the attempts of other well-meaning adults to help her. Gradually, it emerges that Imani was conceived as the result of a rape, but Tasha cannot see anything of the hated father in the baby. Daily occurrences include gunfire, encounters with crack dealers, cleaning up after her mother's alcoholic friend, and her first willing sexual encounters (with a boy as confused as she is). Porter tells this story entirely in dialect, and although the lack of quotation marks sometimes creates confusion, for the most part the narrative draws readers into this teenager's life. The author is particularly successful at portraying adults: teachers, relatives, and neighbors are believably and often amusingly complex even while Tasha's view of them remains that of a child. In an emotionally wrenching ending, Imani is killed, the victim of gang violence, whereupon Tasha finds faith of a different sort through her community. In a final twist that makes sense allegorically even while it is perhaps the most inexplicable development of all, Tasha chooses to become pregnant again. Whether seen as a tale of hopelessness or "faith," this tale is sure to find a passionate readership among teens, who will hear a kindred spirit in Tasha's vivid, unforgettable voice.
Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
"The doctor say she see it every day, babies having babies." Fifteen-year-old Tasha Dawson narrates a tale of teenage motherhood in Porter's second adult novel (after All-Bright Court). Balancing her honor-roll grades with the perils of surviving inner-city Buffalo, N.Y., Tasha gives birth to Imani?a child conceived in violence and given a name that means "faith." . The young mother expresses a powerful, protective love for her daughter even as she herself negotiates her existence among drug dealers and bigoted authorities and explores her own adolescent sexuality. She struggles to understand her mother's new relationship with a white man; her own desires, shame and pride; and the nature of a God who is both merciless and loved. Just when Tasha appears to have found a place for herself with Imani and in school, her world is devastated by a flash of injustice that changes her life forever. Porter spins the tale in a series of flashbacks, telling Tasha's story in a nonlinear fashion and with a bold dialect, mirroring the survival strategies of indirection that Tasha employs in her complex navigation of young adulthood, motherhood and urban life. Porter is also known as a young-adult fiction writer (the Addy books in the American Girls series), and at times this novel slips uncomfortably into YA simplicity, especially in its resolutely uplifting final scenes, which offer an almost cloyingly spiritual happy ending to Tasha's complicated, earthbound story. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA-Imani's name means "faith," and her mother, Tasha, is a 15-year-old African-American high school honors student. Tasha's mother is emotionally distant and the teen resolutely turns away from the attempts of other well-meaning adults to help her. Gradually, it emerges that Imani was conceived as the result of a rape, but Tasha cannot see anything of the hated father in the baby. Daily occurrences include gunfire, encounters with crack dealers, cleaning up after her mother's alcoholic friend, and her first willing sexual encounters (with a boy as confused as she is). Porter tells this story entirely in dialect, and although the lack of quotation marks sometimes creates confusion, for the most part the narrative draws readers into this teenager's life. The author is particularly successful at portraying adults: teachers, relatives, and neighbors are believably and often amusingly complex even while Tasha's view of them remains that of a child. In an emotionally wrenching ending, Imani is killed, the victim of gang violence, whereupon Tasha finds faith of a different sort through her community. In a final twist that makes sense allegorically even while it is perhaps the most inexplicable development of all, Tasha chooses to become pregnant again. Whether seen as a tale of hopelessness or "faith," this tale is sure to find a passionate readership among teens, who will hear a kindred spirit in Tasha's vivid, unforgettable voice.
Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
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