By Alicia D. Williams
A thirteen-year-old girl who has been taught to hate her dark skin fights her way, painfully and then triumphantly, toward loving herself.
Genesis keeps a running list of reasons to hate herself, and near the top sits the color of her skin. She's the darkest one in her family, teased for it by classmates and cut down by some of her own relatives, and she tries drastic things to lighten herself, lemon juice, harsh scrubbing, an over-the-counter bleaching cream, none of which work and all of which leave marks. Her family is being evicted yet again because of her father's drinking, so she starts over as the new girl at another school partway through the year. There a chorus teacher catches something in her voice and pulls her into singing, where a few friendships begin to take hold.
This is the deepest book on the shelf, and it goes where the younger books can't: all the way inside a child who has been taught, by the world and by her own family, that her dark skin makes her less. It's honest about colorism in a way few children's books dare, including the painful truth that some of the cruelty comes from people who love her. It asks a lot, real length, real pain, but it rewards a child ready for it with one of the most triumphant self-acceptance arcs in middle grade. For an older child wrestling with skin color, hair, or feeling like the 'wrong' kind of pretty, this can be the book that names it and then lifts them out.