This Side of Home
Two identical Black sisters find themselves growing apart as their Portland neighborhood experiences rapid gentrification and their school principal attempts to erase its “ghetto” history. This “powerful contemporary coming-of-age novel” offers a “compelling and authentic narrative that highlights the multifaceted nature of Black life,” Rhuday-Perkovich says. [1]
Plot
identical twins Nikki and Maya have been on the same page for everything—friends, school, boys and starting off their adult lives at a historically African-American college. But as their neighborhood goes from rough-and-tumble to up-and-coming, suddenly filled with pretty coffee shops and boutiques, Nikki is thrilled while Maya feels like their home is slipping away. Suddenly, the sisters who had always shared everything must confront their dissenting feelings on the importance of their ethnic and cultural identities and, in the process, learn to separate themselves from the long shadow of their identity as twins. [2]
Controversy
gentrification has caused their landlord to price them out of the neighborhood.
Institutionalized racism also plagues the girls' lives. The students at the girls' high school do not get new books like kids at more privileged schools, and the twins' mother drives them to the other side of town because the parks are better there. School officials do not want the kids to end up as statistics: dead, in jail, addicted to drugs, or members of gangs.
Being constantly defined by her race wears on Maya. When she is in a store, she is asked to check her belongings while white customers peacefully shop with much larger bags. What she would give simply to be referred to as a person, and not always as a black person.
Maya and her friends are convinced that youth of color need to be portrayed in a more positive light. She is newly elected the student council president, but is shocked to find that it is merely a figurehead position while the school principal pulls the strings. He bans a Black History Month celebration—against the student council's advice—and replaces it with a diversity luncheon. [3]