In a memoir of growing up in the Bronx during the Depression, the author recalls her father's death in 1939, her family's financial woes, and her mother's creation of a rooming house, bringing in tenants who would change their lives.

"Set in 1993, teenage Claire navigates the eerie town of Indianola, Texas, where a fissure in time and space has made nothing is as it seems"-- June, 1993. Claire has been dumped in Indianola, Texas, to spend her whole vacation taking care of mean, sickly Grammy. Indianola is a run-down, shabby, pin-dot on the Gulf Coast. But if you leave Indianola, you forget about it... and if you stay, you have to live with it every day. Because there's a confluence...

Jamila Clarke. Josie Rivera. Francesca George. Three mixed-race girls, close friends whose immigrant parents worked hard to settle their families in a neighborhood with the best schools. The three girls are outsiders there, but they have each other. Now, at the start seventh grade, they are told they will be part of an experiment, taking a long bus ride to a brand-new school built to "mix up the black and white kids." Their parents don't want them...