A companion cycle to 145th Street: Short Stories (2000) examines love in its many forms in one Harlem neighborhood. A family celebrates their father’s passing with a fashion show in the hair salon they’ve just bought. A schoolgirl takes care of her little brother and her mother, an AIDS patient, as best she can. A high-school senior faces a choice between a charismatic man and college. A 16-year-old struggles with loving her drug-addicted older brother. A teen father attempts a hold-up to get the money to buy his son a birthday gift. A teen mother finds grace as an artist’s model. Two soldiers far from home find comfort together in Afghanistan. Sometimes funny, sometimes achingly sad, the tales explore the tender side of 145th St. Love doesn’t come easy in Myers’s Harlem, but it’s there, weaving the neighborhood together in a tapestry of relationships—some easy, some hard, all supremely human. Love is inevitable, the author seems to be saying, and we all deserve a piece of it, however flawed we may be. Gently told, beautifully modulated, these stories go straight to the heart. (Short stories. YA)
