Peas and Carrots
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- $99.00
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- $99.00
Descripción editorial
A rich and memorable story from a Coretta Scott King honor award-winning author about a teenage foster girl looking for a place to call home.
Dess knows that nothing good lasts. Disappointment is never far away, and that’s a truth that Dess has learned to live with.
Dess’s mother’s most recent arrest is just the latest in a long line of disappointments, but this one lands her with her baby brother’s foster family. Dess doesn’t exactly fit in with the Carters. They’re so happy, so comfortable, so normal, and Hope, their teenage daughter, is so hopelessly naïve. Dess and Hope couldn’t be more unlike each other, but Austin loves them both like sisters. Over time their differences, insurmountable at first, fall away to reveal two girls who want the same thing: to belong.
Tanita S. Davis, a Coretta Scott King Honor winner, weaves a tale of two modern teenagers defying stereotypes and deciding for themselves what it means to be a family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The daughter of an abusive father and drug-addicted mother, 15-year-old Dess has led a tumultuous life, hopping from one social-service placement to another. Now, with her father in prison and her mother planning to testify against him, Dess has a chance to reunite with her four-year-old brother, Austin, if she can bear living with his rich foster parents. Even harder to tolerate is the Carters' nerdy teenage daughter, Hope, who is the complete opposite of aggressive, hard-edged Dess. Alternating between the girls' perspectives, Davis (Happy Families) insightfully traces the difficult adjustments each teen faces, coexisting in a home where everyone is supposed to "choose kindness" in all things. Davis gracefully and honestly addresses Dess's discomfort in living with parents of another race (she is white, while the Carters are black), and the misunderstandings borne out of prejudice. Yet the central focus remains on Dess and Hope's internal conflicts, which run deeper than their current living arrangements, particularly as Dess faces a hard choice: protecting a member of her birth family or remaining with a family she has almost begun to trust. Ages 12 up.
