And so, you can feel very strange, feeling this tension in your city or your community, but no one is saying anything. A lot of times, adults are just not talking with you about it. I write realistic fiction because I want young people and the adults in their lives to have a way to talk about what's happening, but have some space so you can talk about the characters in the book, and not necessarily your own story yet, if you're not ready to have that conversation.Īnd I know from personal experience that, you know, when you're a child, it's not that you don't know stuff is happening. On what moved her to write about race, gender and class Maxine is black and the school, they make the assumption that, 'Well, she's a black woman, and so that means you're gonna get along just fine.' And they don't at first because it's such a vast difference in the way that they grew up and the resources that Maxine has, that it just takes a moment for them to figure out where do they connect and how can they really see each other beyond superficial, materialistic things. On Jade's relationship with her mentor, Maxine 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. '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.'

'She's wondering is success only achievable, can it only happen, she leaves her neighborhood, her family, all the things that she calls home,' Watson says. 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 makes friends and does well, but she also feels the school sees her as some kind of project - and she doesn't like it.Ī mentor named Maxine comes into her life with a program called Woman to Woman.

Francis, a private school that's mostly white. 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. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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Piecing Me Together by Renée Watson