Drifting

Fourteen- year-old Jasmine Hinton is leaving home—but not because she wants to. Bags piled high in the rear of their car, she and her father, Darryl, abruptly left their apartment in Richmond, Virginia heading for Raleigh, North Carolina. Jasmine has left her best friend, Rachel, the school she loves, and everything familiar behind. Bewildered, Jasmine doesn’t understand the sudden move and her father will only say that it’s best for them to move on.

But why?

A series of confusing events and strange behavior by her father leads Jasmine to question what’s really going on. Is her father in trouble? She starts to ask questions, but they never seem to be answered, leaving Jasmine baffled and even hurt. Father and daughter have gone from a pleasant suburban existence to living a strangely isolated life in a dilapidated residential hotel.
Disobeying her father’s inexplicable rule that she spend all her days in their hotel room while he searches for work, a bored and lonely Jasmine becomes friends with the daughter of the hotel’s owner, 19-year-old Felicia. Jasmine and Felicia find they have something in common—both their mothers are dead, both of them are only children, both of them are drifting. Soon they discover they have even more in common—a plethora of secrets, lies, and betrayals.

Drifting is an uncommon coming-of-age story about a young girl and her journey to uncover the truth about her life.

Lisa R. Nelson Nelson is a graduate of Temple University. She is a senior staff member at a large non-profit family services agency in Philadelphia where she lives. Her short stories, “Thirteen” and “From Where They Sit” appeared in the anthology, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth. Drifting is Nelson’s first novel. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about black history.