Off-Color
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Spunky and headstrong, Cameron blasts music, challenges adults, and cuts class when she feels like it. She lives with her single mom in Brooklyn and hangs out with best friends Amanda, P, and Crystal. Life in their working-class neighborhood is pretty cool until Cameron's mother suddenly loses her job and can no longer afford the rent. Move to public housing? YG2BK! But no one's kidding, and Cameron finds herself living in the projects. Can a white girl from across town hope to be accepted by the black girls in the projects? A revelation from the past forces Cameron to confront a startling truth that just might put things in perspective . . . that is, if Cameron can handle it.
Hilarious, surprising, and defiantly candid, Off-Color is a thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining new novel from Janet McDonald. Hip and wise, the author grabs the readers and doesn't let go.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cameron has problems getting to school on time and passing her classes, but she loves the fun friends from her Brooklyn neighborhood, and she and her single mom get along fairly well except for "hassles over certain things like clothes and chores and hair." Her life changes dramatically when her mother loses her job at a nail salon and they are forced to move into the projects. Soon after, Cameron discovers that the father she has never known is black (though careful readers may guess the secret long before it is revealed). McDonald (Harlem Hustle) weaves in a variety of sources, from Othello to modern celebrities like Mariah Carey, as Cameron launches into a series of unusually believable discussions about race with her classmates, teachers, and both school and project friends (a white friend asks, "Anyway, real black people aren't gonna think you're black, so why try to be something you're not?"); these frank conversations will surely get readers thinking as well. Text messages and "ghetto fabulous" dialogue inject lots of motion, even if the plot meanders some (the book is more than half over before Cameron finds photos of her father holding her as a baby). Readers will be impressed with Cameron's growing strength, and they'll be swept up in the exuberant writing. Ages 12-up.
