Does growing up have to mean growing apart? From Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Author Award winner Renée Watson comes a poignant novel about love for home and for ourselves, embracing change, and what it means to grow up.
Identical twins Maya and Nikki have always agreed on the important things—their friends, the right boys, their plans for college and the future. But before senior year begins, too many things are changing. Their neighborhood is starting to get nice—and not really in a way Maya enjoys. With houses turning into trendy coffee shops and restaurants, and neighbors, including their best friend, Essence, being pushed out, Maya’s neighborhood is becoming unrecognizable. And when a new—White—family buys the house Essence’s mom rented, Nikki suddenly has a new best friend and Maya has a new admirer, someone she’s not sure she should like. And then there’s their principal, intent on prioritizing the comfort of White students at the expense of the school’s largely Black identity. What’s worse, no one seems to be as alarmed by these changes as Maya is—not even Nikki. As Maya struggles to hold on, she begins to wonder where—and with whom—she belongs.
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RENEE WATSON is the Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Author Award-winning author of the novels Piecing Me Together, This Side of Home, What Momma Left Me, Betty Before X, co-written with Ilyasah Shabazz, and two picture books: Harlem's Little Blackbird and A Place Where Hurricanes Happen. Renee is the founder of I, Too, Arts Collective, a nonprofit commi
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