«Black, White, Other» by Joan Steinau Lester

"The tenderness and truth of the book moved my heart. As well as the enormous love." - Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple Joan Steinau Lester’s newest book looks that the emotional and social experience of Nina, a teen girl living in LA who feels caught between two worlds—the “white” world of her mother and the “black” world of her father. This nowhere land of race becomes harder to navigate when the support system her parents offered is shattered by their divorce. Now with racial tensions rising in her school and community, her white friends seeing her as too ghetto and her black friends labeling her too white, and her father pressuring her to take up her black heritage, Nina feels lost and abandoned. Even Nina’s faith seems to fail her—how can she cling to God and the songs of the church when God’s image in her seems twisted? When Nina discovers a book her father is writing about Sarah, her great-great grandmother who escaped from slavery on the Underground Railroad, Nina finds someone who can understand her feelings of being trapped in an upside-down world. But will those stories be enough to guide Nina through the pressures she now faces?