Renée Watson’s young adult novel Piecing Me Together tells the story of Jade, a Portland, Ore., high school student with “coal skin and hula-hoop hips.” Jade has won a scholarship to St. Francis, a private school that’s mostly white. She makes friends and does well, but she also feels the school sees her as some kind of project — and she doesn’t like it.
A mentor named Maxine comes into her life with a program called Woman to Woman. Maxine is black too, and once lived in her neighborhood, but Jade wonders if Maxine just sees her as someone who needs to be saved.
“She’s wondering is success only achievable, can it only happen, [if] she leaves her neighborhood, her family, all the things that she calls home,” Watson says. “Because she’s getting these messages from the adults in her life that in order to succeed, she has to get out of her economically poor neighborhood.”
Piecing Me Together recently received the Coretta Scott King Award from the American Library Association, and it’s also a John Newbery Medal honor book.
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