Author: Louisa Onome
Genre: realistic fiction
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Rating:
Summary (provided by publisher): Chinelo, or Nelo as her best friend Kate calls her, is all about her neighborhood Ginger East. She loves its chill vibe, ride-or-die sense of community, and the memories she has growing up there with her friends. Ginger East isn't what it used to be though. After a deadly incident at the local arcade, most of her friends' families moved away. Kate, whose family owns the local corner store, is still there and as long as that stays constant, Nelo's good.
When Kate's parent's store is vandalized and the vandal still at large, Nelo is shaken to her core. And then the police and the media get involved and more of the outside world descends upon Ginger East with promises to "fix the neighborhood." Suddenly, Nelo finds herself in the middle of a drama unfolding on a national scale.
Worse yet, Kate is acting strange. She's pushing Nelo away at the exact moment they need each other most. Now Nelo's entire world is morphing into something she hates and she must figure out how to get things back on track or risk losing everything--and everyone--she loves.
My opinion: I've started noticing book recently that focus on gentrification. It's an unexpected trend but an important one. We need to understand the full social impact of these events on people and communities. This book shows us a community in decline, largely because of gentrification. Always a bit of a rough place, Ginger East is losing small businesses and desperation is driving residents to actions of questionable legality. While the inciting incident is an act of vandalism, the plot isn't especially driven by the mystery of the vandal's identity. Rather, the focus is on how the world around Nelo is changing: businesses and people. We see how moving to different neighborhoods and stratified a once tight-knit group of friends to the point that they barely understand each other. We see a number of different perspectives on the changes in Ginger East, both positive and negative. Onome also invites us to consider who has a right to be a part of the conversation about these changes. We see characters taking advantage of a social justice situation for their own benefit, for optics. We're asked to question what battles are worth fighting and when we just need to accept change. This is a book with a lot of content, but not a lot of action. More thinking than doing.
Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley.
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