Piecing Me Together

Jade is a Black girl from a poor Portland neighborhood attending a mostly white private school on a scholarship. She's smart, she works hard, and she keeps being selected for programs designed to help girls like her — mentorship initiatives, opportunity programs, leadership workshops. What nobody seems to notice is that being constantly identified as someone who needs to be helped, lifted, developed, is its own form of not being seen. Watson names the specific exhaustion of being someone else's diversity initiative — the way that opportunity can arrive wrapped in condescension, the difference between being offered a hand and being treated as an equal. Coretta Scott King Award winner. The most precise middle grade novel about the gap between opportunity and equity and what it feels like to live inside that gap.