A novel that reads more like a memoir than fiction.
The narrator talks the authentic talk of tough girls in the hood, although she continually protests that she “comes from money” and attaches inordinate significance to trivial fashion items like bags and boots. After her parents are arrested, this precocious 10-year-old girl is “kidnapped” by social services. When she takes offense at a remark made by a social worker about her mother, she stabs the woman in the neck with a sharpened No. 2 pencil in the neck and is thereafter incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility, where she meets and trades life stories with other inmates. All of the stories are horrific, some in predictable, stereotypical ways, some so idiosyncratic they could be based on that proverbial truth that is stranger than fiction. Although she is much younger than the others, she is recruited into a clique called The Diamond Needles by an older white girl, and together, they later escape and go to live on an Indian reservation with a woman the girl knows. The novel takes the reader into the moment-to-moment, day-to-day life of Porsche Santiaga from early childhood to young womanhood, a life of dancing, yearning for her family and mourning for her momma; a life of seeking and eventually discovering love.
A book that will appeal to the author's many fans.
