Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I rarely do this, but I find I can’t properly review Renee Watson’s Piecing Me Together (please pretend there’s an accent on the middle ‘e’ in ‘Renee’!) without quoting two of the blurbs on the back.  Jacqueline Woodson asserts that “Watson’s elegantly crafted novel speaks to the myriad of people who find themselves searching for themselves in the world,” and that is apt; it’s Meg Medina’s first sentence, however, that blows me away.  “A nuanced story about girls navigating the land mines of others’ good intentions, Piecing Me Together will make readers wrestle with every assumption they have about race, economic class, and so-called at-risk kids.”  That phrase–“the land mines of others’ good intentions”–wow.  And she was right–I did wrestle with my assumptions.  I was desperately grateful, however, not to have done so because I felt stereotyped as a white person.  Watson’s skill in portraying conflict and resolution between all sorts of different sources seriously impressed me.

Simply put, Piecing Me Together is the story of a poor black girl on scholarship to a wealthy private school.  The school is predominantly white, but there are also wealthy black girls and poor white girls, and Jade is learning the all important life skill of speaking up instead of giving up.  As her friend Lee Lee tells her, “If you speak up and they dismiss you, that’s on them.  But if you stay quiet and just quit, well–”  What Jade finds as she practices speaking up is that often people mean well but may be looking at things from a different perspective entirely–and that most of the important things in life are going to require speaking up now and then.  (Not to mention the fact that THE IMPORTANT THINGS ARE WORTH IT.)  I do have some doubts about this as a Newbery pick–while not inappropriate, many of the issues involved seemed to be issues for the teenage mindset instead of a child’s–but I have none about it being an award winner.  Watson’s story is going to stick with me for a long, long time.