Title: This Side of Home Author: Renée Watson
Published: February 3, 2015
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 336
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Identical twins Nikki and Maya have been on the same page for everything—friends, school, boys and starting off their adult lives at a historically African-American college. But as their neighborhood goes from rough-and-tumble to up-and-coming, suddenly filled with pretty coffee shops and boutiques, Nikki is thrilled while Maya feels like their home is slipping away. Suddenly, the sisters who had always shared everything must confront their dissenting feelings on the importance of their ethnic and cultural identities and, in the process, learn to separate themselves from the long shadow of their identity as twins.
In her inspired YA debut, Renée Watson explores the experience of young African-American women navigating the traditions and expectations of their culture.
This book is legitimately the young adult novel I’ve been waiting for ever since I first started reading YA three years ago. This Side of Home is beautifully written and is complex in its discussion of race relations, ethnicity, and identity. The author, writing as high school senior Maya Younger, offers a narrative that is intimate and honest, with a level of insight that is mature and entirely in character.
This Side of Home is about a lot of things: it’s about high school, it’s about budding romance and sisters and friendship in unexpected places, it’s about reconciling your dreams with the limitations of your situation, it’s about letting your voice be heard in a society that only wants you to stay quiet. A great deal of this book is about race and the microaggressions that Maya and her community face on a daily basis, about the shame and pride and struggle that are all a part of life as an African-American. Every bit of this story comes together to create a nuanced, authentic picture of Maya and her senior year of high school.
I just…honestly I’m so deeply grateful to Renée Watson for writing this book. The YA world needs this story. It needs Maya’s observations of feeling like an outsider in her own neighborhood and also her joy and pride in having a history and culture, with role models like Ida B. Wells and Ethel L. Payne to look up to. Everything about This Side of Home felt so real to me, real in a way that I sometime find lacking in novels. But every scene of this book felt truthful, and I finished reading with the feeling that a certain unnamed need I had had been filled by Watson’s story.
This is really the kind of book that I think everyone ought to at least consider reading. It’s a portrait of living life in our society that’s painted by a voice too often ignored, and that’s important and beautiful.
