By Jennifer Baszile
From Booklist
The Baszile family’s move to an exclusive white suburb in Palos Verde, California, was the culmination of the parents’ striving for a racially integrated, middle-class life. For their daughters, it meant isolation and coping with the occasional racial slurs that went along with the advantages of suburban life. Their parents veered between an aggressive integration strategy and an equally aggressive strategy to keep their daughters socially connected to other black teens. There would be no interracial dating, they declared. Visits to her father’s childhood home in rural Louisiana and her mother’s in Detroit showed the stark contrast between their parents’ upbringing and their own, the trade-off between financial comfort and racial isolation versus economic struggle and racial camaraderie. Through adolescence, Baszile strove to reconcile her job at Kentucky Fried Chicken and her coming out in the debutante ball, her family’s increasing estrangement as her father’s behavior became more erratic, and her own efforts to find an identity for herself. This is an absorbing look behind the facade of one black family’s striving for integration and the American dream. --Vanessa Bush
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