
Price: £12.99
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Genre: Fiction
Age Range: 10-14 Middle/Secondary
Length: 320pp
Buy the Book
Blended
Her Dad is Black, her Mom is White; her best friend Imani is Black, her other best friend Heather is White; her school in Cincinnati has 50% Black students, 50% White. Her Mom calls her Izzy, her Dad insists on Isabella. Mom serves tables at Waffle House; her Dad is a hot shot lawyer. Her problem is, who is she? When she fills in forms at school, does she tick ‘Black’, ‘White’ or ‘Other’? (She settles on Black and is proud to do so.) When her parents split up and after a while make new relationships, her Mom is with a White guy who manages Scatterpin Lanes bowling alley, while her Dad is with a Black interior designer with high-end clients. Izzy likes both new partners, but she now has yet more balancing acts to learn, which is tough when you are 11 years old.
Then there are the things people say: ‘you’re so exotic …you look so unusual… but what are you really?’ And the stereotyping – a boy she thought she liked tells her, ‘Mixed kids are always pretty’. Sometimes, it’s like being caught in the crossfire in Nomansland and it’s never more of a battlefield than on a Sunday afternoon at the Mall for the weekly handover ritual. There’s a row if either side is late – each parent demands the full measure of her time. The infantile squabbles hit new depths when Dad arranges to re-marry on the same date that his ex has already chosen for her nuptials; he argues that the appointed hour falls during his week with Isabella, and he’s not budging.
Izzy also faces difficult issues at school. She usually enjoys lessons with that teen fiction standby, a caring, sensitive English teacher. Mr Kazilly is a vocab freak, introducing his class to such curiosities as ‘Gardyloo’. He’s also a poetry enthusiast who shares the likes of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou with his kids before encouraging them to write poems themselves (which Izzy does, very well). Then, one day, his pastoral skills are tested to their limits when, after an honest, wide-ranging discussion sparked by the word ‘lynch’, including heartfelt comment by Imani, someone rigs up a noose in the latter’s locker. Not long after, at the Mall, Izzy and Imani feel the heavy hand of White authority when they’re checking out a new designer label outlet. ‘This store is probably not the best choice for you two,’ says a security guard, as he ushers them out.
It may be that Sharon Draper has loaded her narrative with more conflicts than can be explored in one book; and that in search of light relief she introduces overlong, more frivolous episodes, such as Shopping Expeditions to the Mall to pick up the latest product from Slime Store or a T-shirt with a whimsical slogan. A UK reader might find the consumer culture alien, along with the extravagance of Daddy’s house with its 7 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, the Steinway in the music room and the new black Merc in the garage.
Izzy’s anchor throughout the storms is her music. She loves that Steinway and she also loves the utter freedom she finds in rehearsing a sonatina for performance at the forthcoming Pianopalooza recital under the strict but caring tutelage of Madame Rubenstein. Ultimately Izzy is the means of healing between the adults around her, but only by way of a climax which, given the novel’s date of publication, must have been a prescient foreshadowing of the killing of George Floyd.