And shots are fired.Įleven-year-old Jenae doesn’t have any friends-and she’s just fine with that. Isabella and Darren are stopped by the police. It seems like nothing can bring Isabella’s family together again-until the worst happens. What does it mean to be half white or half black? To belong to half mom and half dad? And if you’re only seen as half of this and half of that, how can you ever feel whole? Her dad is black, her mom is white, and strangers are always commenting: “You’re so exotic!” “You look so unusual.” “But what are you really?” She knows what they’re really saying: “You don’t look like your parents.” “You’re different.” “What race are you really?” And when her parents, who both get engaged at the same time, get in their biggest fight ever, Isabella doesn’t just feel divided, she feels ripped in two. And she’s is beginning to realize that being split between Mom and Dad is more than switching houses, switching nicknames, switching backpacks: it’s also about switching identities. Isabella feels even more stuck in the middle, split and divided between them than ever. And now that her parents are divorced, it seems their fights are even worse, and they’re always about HER. The next week she’s Izzy with her mom and her boyfriend John-Mark in a small, not-so-fancy house that she loves.īecause of this, Isabella has always felt pulled between two worlds. She is about to make big waves on the island-and give Clara a summer she won’t forget.Įleven-year-old Isabella’s parents are divorced, so she has to switch lives every week: One week she’s Isabella with her dad, his girlfriend Anastasia, and her son Darren living in a fancy house where they are one of the only black families in the neighborhood. Everyone is buzzing with excitement over a new girl in the village who is not like other visitors. Other times her Mama fills in the blanks…only she knows those aren’t her memories and it is hard feeling like she is not like everybody else.īut this summer is going to be different for Clara. Sometimes things come back to her in drips like a tap that hasn’t been turned off properly. The only thing out of the ordinary for Clara is that something happened to her memory that made her forget everything that happened last summer after a hurricane hit. She loves eating ripe mangos off the ground, running outside in the rain with her Papa during rainy season, and going to her secret hideout with Gaynah-even though lately she’s not acting like a best friend.

But there’s nothing exotic about it to Clara. Twelve-year-old Clara lives on an island that visitors call exotic.

Epic books for middle school