A deeper love inside: the Porsche Santiaga story

Everyone who knows and loves hip-hop star Sister Souljah's best-selling The Coldest Winter Ever will remember the beautiful, bedeviling Porsche Santiaga, Winter's little sister. Now Porsche gets her own story. Fans are waiting. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A novel that reads more like a memoir than fiction. The narrator talks the authentic talk of tough girls in the hood, although she continually protests that she "comes from money" and attaches inordinate significance to trivial fashion items like bags and boots. After her parents are arrested, this precocious 10-year-old girl is "kidnapped" by social services. When she takes offense at a remark made by a social worker about her mother, she stabs the woman in the neck with a sharpened No. 2 pencil in the neck and is thereafter incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility, where she meets and trades life stories with other inmates. All of the stories are horrific, some in predictable, stereotypical ways, some so idiosyncratic they could be based on that proverbial truth that is stranger than fiction. Although she is much younger than the others, she is recruited into a clique called The Diamond Needles by an older white girl, and together, they later escape and go to live on an Indian reservation with a woman the girl knows. The novel takes the reader into the moment-to-moment, day-to-day life of Porsche Santiaga from early childhood to young womanhood, a life of dancing, yearning for her family and mourning for her momma; a life of seeking and eventually discovering love. A book that will appeal to the author's many fans.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Everyone who knows and loves hip-hop star Sister Souljah's best-selling The Coldest Winter Ever will remember the beautiful, bedeviling Porsche Santiaga, Winter's little sister. Now Porsche gets her own story. Fans are waiting.

In this long-awaited companion to Sister Souljah's groundbreaking The Coldest Winter Ever, narrator Porsche Santiago recalls her grim adolescence following the downfall of her drug king father, Ricky Santiaga. Unlike her older sister Winter, who flamboyantly played men to get ahead in the game, Porsche finds herself in juvy and joins a girl gang to establish a network that leads to a Shawshank Redemption-esque escape. On the outside, Porsche sets about reconnecting with her family but is emotionally shattered to discover that her mother (as fans of The Coldest Winter Ever will recall) has fallen under crack's death grip. While this youngster has a knack for making money, she learns fixing her heart is "f*#king impossible." VERDICT Sister Souljah's name is a sure bet and her legions of fans will not be disappointed in this hefty tale of Porsche's path to self awareness. Although this is more a novel about relationships than hardened street lit, Sister Souljah writes with authority about a child finding peace. [Previewed in "African American Perspectives for Black History Month", LJ 11/16/12.] (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.