Summary: LaToya Williams lives in Montgomery, Alabama, and attends a mostly white high school. It seems as if her only friend is her older brother, Alex. Toya doesn’t know where she fits in, but after a run-in with another student, she wonders if life would be different if she were . . . different. And then a higher power answers her prayer: to be “anything but black.”
Toya is suddenly white, blond, and popular. Now what?
Randi Pink’s debut is heartfelt, honest, and sure to be controversial. The characters ring painfully true, from Toya, who must choose whose reality she will honor, to her sweet, smart brother Alex, who tries to dull his own genius to avoid standing out, to the clueless , racial-slur-spewing twins Amera and Amelia, who turn out to be powerless once called on their nonsense. Compelling and compulsively readable, this book is also a brutal, incisive commentary on the role of the media in denigrating black bodies and the mental and emotional damage that systemic racism does to the individual.
INTO WHITE is out now.
Kathy MacMillan 