Salt the Water - Hardcover

Iloh, Candice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593529316 ISBN 13: 9780593529317

Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2023

Synopsis

A Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book

Cerulean Gene is free everywhere except school, where they’re known for repeatedly challenging authority. Raised in a free-spirited home by two loving parents who encourage Cerulean to be their full self, they’ve got big dreams of moving cross-country to live off the grid with their friends after graduation. But a fight with a teacher spirals out of control, and Cerulean impulsively drops out to avoid the punishment they fear is coming. Why wait for graduation to leave an oppressive capitalist system and live their dreams? 
 
Cerulean is truly brilliant, but their sheltered upbringing hasn’t prepared them for the consequences of their choice — especially not when it’s compounded by a family emergency that puts a parent out of work. Suddenly the money they’d been stacking with their friends is a resource that the family needs to stay afloat.
 
Salt the Water is a book about dreaming in a world that has other plans for your time, your youth, and your future. It asks, what does it look like when a bunch of queer Black kids are allowed to dream? And what does it look like for them to confront the present circumstances of the people they love while still pursuing a wildly different future of their own?

About this title

About the Author

Candice Iloh is a first-generation Nigerian American writer whose books center home. They are from the Midwest by way of Washington, DC, and Brooklyn, New York. They are a proud alumna of the Rhode Island Writers Colony, and their work has earned fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA, and Kimbilio Fiction and a residency with Hi-ARTS, where they debuted their first one-person show in 2018. Candice became a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and, in 2021, a Printz Award Honoree for their debut novel, Every Body Looking. Salt the Water, their third novel, earned Candice their second Michael L. Printz Award Honor in 2024.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

last summer we’d come up with The Pact: realizing P.S. 5000 would never send us somewhere worth the trip we’d pool our money to book tickets to sunny California for a summer / we always been just a bunch of Bronx babies knowing nothing much but bodegas, superspreader house parties & subway horror stories / but we knew something else might be on the other side / we all knew we needed to find something different than the go-to-college or bad-reality-show conveyor belt so our hustle became dreaming about what it might be like to live a different life / one filled with art / love / sunshine on our faces / not all of us were artists but we knew we wanted to create some other kind of world / somewhere / that’d allow all of us to be ourselves / something like the world Iya & Baba had made for my brother & me

but something we’d never seen

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593529316
• ISBN 13: 9780593529317
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288