DASIA (FOREVER)

A sleepless night in a cancer ward becomes a reckoning of hurt and resilience for a Black teen.

Thirteen-year-old Dasia Riley has felt alone for too long. Her abusive father is dead, her beloved older brother is incarcerated, and her emotionally volatile mother locks herself in her room for days on end. Now, suddenly facing leukemia and an exhausting treatment without a single visitor, there-for-everyone-else Dasia seems to have no one to care for her. Then a fellow patient, who from her wealth to her “extra-light skin (though not white)” could not be more Dasia’s opposite, appears in her hospital room. Over the course of a single night, Dasia forms an unlikely bond with Jimmy, whose blunt humor and stubborn conviction challenge Dasia’s dangerous certainty that she has nothing left to fight for. When revelations about Jimmy recast the night’s conversations, a story seemingly about friendship and commonality becomes something stranger and more profound. Although enriched by its connection to the Dear Martin (2017) universe, Stone’s latest, like its protagonist, stands firmly on its own. The text alternates between Dasia and Jimmy’s night in the hospital and Dasia’s free verse reflections on the compounding events that led her here, written as unsent letters to her big brother. These parallel conversations with people beyond Dasia’s reach explore the ways that expression in and of itself can be a lifeline for those facing so much more than cancer.

A heartrending ode to the pain and relief of finding the words.