Like Sisters on the Homefront - Hardcover

Williams-Garcia, Rita

4.2

1,507 ratings by Goodreads

9780525674658: Like Sisters on the Homefront

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525674659 ISBN 13: 9780525674658

Publisher: Dutton Juvenile, 1995

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When street-smart Gayle, a tough African-American fourteen-year-old from New York, moves with her new baby to stay with relatives down South, she starts to learn a lot about family traditions and connections.

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About the Author:

Rita Williams-Garcia (born 1957) is an American writer of young adult novels. She won the 2011 Newbery Honor Award, Coretta Scott King Award, and Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction for her book One Crazy Summer. She won the PEN/Norma Klein Award. Her book P.S. Be Eleven won the Coretta Scott King Award in 2014. In 2016 her book Gone Crazy in Alabama won the Coretta Scott King Award.

From Booklist:

Gr. 8^-12. At 14, Gayle is pregnant. Again. The first time she kept the baby. This time her mother drags Gayle to have an abortion and then sends her away from the projects in Jamaica, New York, on a one-way ticket to family in Georgia. For Gayle, it's like being "sold to slavery." She's never met her mother's family, and they don't particularly want her in their big mansion. Her uncle is a pastor; her sweet teenage cousin, Cookie, looks as if she's "straight out of Mommy-Made-Me magazine." Gayle shocks them with her street talk, her cussing, and her free and unrepentant talk of sex. She hates being in a house full of Holy Rollers "whose rap is praise the Lord." Only her great-grandmother, a soul mate, loves Gayle's spirit, laughs at her irreverence, and tells Gayle the family history of slavery, protest, and faith. Like Williams-Garcia's Fast Talk on a Slow Track (1991), this story isn't strong on plot. There are lots of loose ends, and the bonding between the two cousins is contrived. Although Gale finally finds her way home, this is far from a simplistic problem novel. The characters are drawn with depth and affection. The dialogue snaps and swings from raucous insult and jealous anger to painful lyricism. Gayle's voice has some of rap's outrageous self-parody. Best of all is the ironic collision of class and culture between the urban kid and her protected cousin. Gayle is both world-weary and abysmally ignorant, sophisticated and innocent, streetwise and nearly illiterate. She thinks she's tough, and she is, but her rudeness and her humor hide her heartbreak. Teens will welcome this funny, candid story about a world too long absent from YA fiction. Hazel Rochman

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