Disgruntled

Disgruntled
Asali Solomon
Fiction So472d

Kenya Curtis is only eight years old, but she knows that she's different, even if she can't put her finger on how or why. It's not because she's black--most of the other students in the fourth-grade class at her West Philadelphia elementary school are too. Maybe it's because she celebrates Kwanzaa, or because she's forbidden from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Maybe it's because she calls her father--a housepainter-slash-philosopher--"Baba" instead of "Daddy," or because her parents' friends gather to pour out libations "from the Creator, for the Martyrs" and discuss "the community."

Kenya does know that it's connected to what her Baba calls "the shame of being alive"--a shame that only grows deeper and more complex over the course of Asali Solomon's long-awaited debut novel. Disgruntled, effortlessly funny and achingly poignant, follows Kenya from West Philadelphia to the suburbs, from public school to private, from childhood through adolescence, as she grows increasingly disgruntled by her inability to find any place or thing or person that feels like home.

A coming-of-age tale, a portrait of Philadelphia in the late eighties and early nineties, an examination of the impossible double-binds of race, Disgruntled is a novel about the desire to rise above the limitations of the narratives we're given and the painful struggle to craft fresh ones we can call our own.

(From Amazon.)

The Chaos

The Chaos

Nalo Hopkinson 

Fiction H7772c

Scotch has never quite fit in.  With her white Jamaician father and black Canadian mother, she doesn’t belong with the Caribbeans, white, or blacks.  Though recently she feels different for stranger reasons–her skin is being covered in spots of black stickiness that won’t go away no matter what she tries.  Not to mention that she sees floating, bodiless horse heads that no one else can.  

But soon Scotch has even bigger problems.  She’s out for a night with her brother when a bubble of light appears.  Scotch dares her brother to touch it.  He does, and then he disappears.  A moment later a volcano emerges in Lake Ontario, and all Toronto is invaded by the Chaos.  

Scotch is desperate to find her brother, but she doesn’t know where to begin searching in a city gone mad.  Mythical creatures such as Sasquatches are walking down the streets, and ordinary people are transforming in truly weird ways.  Scotch herself is getting blacker and blacker.  Can she find her brother before she becomes completely unrecognizable?

Renowned author Nalo Hopkinson mixes fantasy and Caribbean folklore in this rollicking story of identity and self-acceptance in a world given over to Chaos. (Publisher's description)