I Only Made Up the Roses

Seventeen-year-old Cydra presents a portrait of her family whose history spans three continents.

Grade 8-12 This episodic novel narrated by 17-year-old Cydra is a pastiche made up of descriptions of the deaths and funerals of her grandfathers, the courtship of her mother and step-father, and her encounter with her real father, woven through with stories, history, dreams, and memories shared by members of her family. Readers are nudged on the second page of the novel by this sentence: ``Like everybody else in the room of relatives, except mother and me, Perley is black. . . .'' From this point on the colors and textures of life in a mixed-race extended family are subtly probed and explored. Young readers who have been weaned on fast-paced, plot-rich novels will find this challenging, but should feel at home with Cydra's clear adolescent voice as she, like the storytellers around her, describes the events and people in her life. Barbara Chatton, College of Education, University of Wyoming, Laramie
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