See No Color

YA fiction 

     "'Your mother and I...we have always just wanted to give you things.  I mean, give you everything, really.  Color never mattered to us, what anyone else thought never mattered to us.'  He sighed.  'All we wanted was the best for you kids.'"

     Alex, protagonist of Shannon Gibney's See No Color, is a biracial teenager adopted into a white family.  Although her parents have made a point of not seeing color, the rest of the world doesn't seem to agree with them on this.  White strangers make rude, uncalled for assumptions.  And her Black peers constantly pick on her at school, calling her a white wannabe and worse.

     One day little sister Kit gives Alex a paper that basically shatters her world.  It's a letter from her birth father, Keith, sent five years earlier."

     " I would like to meet you someday.  I am your father.  There was a lot of things that could have been better between your mother and I.  I would have liked the chance to know you."

     It turns out that Alex's parents have been keeping a whole stash of these letters from her.  

     I wanted her [mother] to burn the letters.  I wanted her to say that he meant nothing to me.  How could I tell them that they were my parents--they had raised me, they had loved me all this time, that there was no one else in the world who had any right to me?  But more than saying it, I wanted to feel it.  And I didn't."

     The discovery of the letter isn't the only challenge Alex is facing.  She's a star ball player being groomed to play pro baseball.  But her developing body is throwing off her game, making her future iffy.  And a Black player on another team seems to like her.  

     Gibney, herself a transracial adoptee raised by white parents, raises complex identity issues in this highly engaging coming of age narrative.

On a purrrsonal note, with Fresh Check, the very successful (126 units) blood drive, and the Commuter Lounge's ever popular First Friday Bagels and Coffee it's been a very busy week.  I've also had a not COVID cold that's made me dragging--tired with a touch of brain fog.  But the weekend is here.  Time to try to shake the cold and do a bunch of homework. (Jules)

Doctor Tobago to the rescue!  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to our readers with wishes for a Happy Easter for all who celebrate it.  

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