Rita Williams-Garcia's masterful and bold Coretta Scott King Honor Book is just as fresh, funny, and powerfully relevant today as when it was first published. It is now being reissued with a beautiful, contemporary new cover!

When fourteen-year-old Gayle gets in trouble with a boy-again-her mother doesn't give her a choice: Gayle is getting sent away from New York to her family down South, along with her baby, Jose.

In a small town in Georgia, there is nowhere to go but church, nothing to do but chores, and no friends except her goody-goody, big-boned, kneesock-wearing cousin, Cookie. Gayle is stuck cleaning up after Great, the old family matriarch who stays upstairs in her bed.

But the more she spends time with Cookie and Great, Gayle learns about her family's history and secrets, stretching all the way back through the preachers and ancestors of the past. And slowly, the stories of her roots begin to change how Gayle sees her future.

Rediscover this novel by a master storyteller and Newbery Honor-winning author, about one girl's discovery of her own African American family history-and her own place within it.

There are 224 pages in this book. This book was published 2019 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc .

Rita Williams-Garcia's Newbery Honor-winning novel, One Crazy Summer, was a winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, a National Book Award finalist, the recipient of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and a New York Times bestseller. The sequel, P. S. Be Eleven, was also a Coretta Scott King Award winner and an ALA Notable Children's Book for Middle Readers. She is also the author of six distinguished novels for young adults: Jumped, a National Book Award finalist; No Laughter Here, Every Time a Rainbow Dies (a Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book), and Fast Talk on a Slow Track (all ALA Best Books for Young Adults); Blue Tights; and Like Sisters on the Homefront, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Rita Williams-Garcia lives in Jamaica, New York, is on the faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in the Writing for Children & Young Adults Program, and has two adult daughters, Stephanie and Michelle, and a son-in-law, Adam.