Best Fiction for Young Adults, American Librarians Association Best
Young Adult Book Award, Texas Institute of Letters Best Teen Books,
Kirkus Khosi lives with her beloved grandmother Gogo, her little
sister Zi, and her weekend mother in a matchbox house on the
outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. In that shantytown, it
seems like somebody is dying all the time. Billboards everywhere
warn of the disease of the day. Her Gogo goes to a traditional
healer when there is trouble, but her mother, who works in another
city and is wasting away before their eyes, refuses even to go to
the doctor. She is afraid and Khosi doesn't know what it is that
makes the blood come up from her choking lungs. Witchcraft? A
curse? AIDS? Can Khosi take her to the doctor? Gogo asks. No, says
Mama, Khosi must stay in school. Only education will save Khosi and
Zi from the poverty and ignorance of the old Zulu ways. School,
though, is not bad. There is a boy her own age there, Little Man
Ncobo, and she loves the color of his skin, so much darker than her
own, and his blue-black lips, but he mocks her when a witch's
curse, her mother's wasting sorrow, and a neighbor's accusations
send her and Gogo scrambling off to the sangoma's hut in search of
a healing potion. J.L. Powers holds an MA in African history from
State University of New York-Albany and Stanford University. She
won a Fulbright-Hays grant to study Zulu in South Africa, and
served as a visiting scholar in Stanford's African Studies
Department. She is the award-winning author of four young adult
novels, The Confessional, This Thing Called the Future, Under
Water, and Amina. She is also the editor of two collections of
essays and author of a picture book, Colors of the Wind. She is the
Editorial and Foreign Rights Director of Cinco Puntos Press, and is
founder and editor of the online blog, The Pirate Tree: Social
Justice and Children's Literature. She teaches creative writing,
literature, and composition at Skyline College in California's Bay
Area and served as a jurist for the 2014 NSK Neustadt Prize for
Children's Literature. She launched Catalyst Press in 2017 to
publish African writers. She can be found at www.jlpowers.net,
www.powerssquared.com, and www.catalystpress.org.
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