Coffee Will Make You Black

✍ Scribed by April Sinclair

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 279 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

“A funny, fresh novel about growing up African-American in 1960s Chicago” by an author who “writes like Terry McMillan’s kid sister” (Entertainment Weekly).

In this hilarious and insightful coming-of-age novel, author April Sinclair introduces the charming Jean “Stevie” Stevenson, a young woman raised on Chicago’s South Side during an era of irrevocable social upheaval.

Curious and witty, bold but naïve, Stevie grows up debating the qualities of good hair and dark skin. As the years pass, her family and neighborhood are changed by the times, from the War on Poverty to race riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., from “Black Is Beautiful” to Black Power. Against this remarkable backdrop, Stevie makes the sometimes harrowing, often comic, always enthralling transformation into a young adult—socially aware, discovering her sexuality, and proud of her identity.

“Whether she’s dealing with a subject as monumental as the civil rights movement or as intimate as Stevie’s first sexual encounters,” writes the Los Angeles Times, “Sinclair never fails to make you laugh and never sacrifices the narrative to make a point.”

Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library and named a best book of the year in young adult fiction by the American Library Association, Coffee Will Make You Black is an exquisite portrait of adolescence that will resonate with readers of all ages.

**

From Publishers Weekly

Sinclair's much-touted story of a teenage girl confronting racial prejudice while growing up on Chicago's South Side during the late 1960s.

Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

From newcomer Sinclair, the coming-of-age story of a black girl in 1960's Chicago. Jean Stevie'' Stevenson is a child of the working poor. Her father is a hospital janitor, her mother is a bank teller, and Grandma owns a popular South Side chicken-stand. Sixth-grader Stevie, meanwhile, is tired of her mother's rules, her refusal to countenanceblack English,'' her attempts to make Stevie a dreaded L7'' (square). Stevie's dream is to be popular and cool, and her wish is granted whenall the way cool'' Carla invites her to a party. Soon Stevie has had her first period, her first kiss (from sexy Yusef), and is learning that cool is not necessarily kind, for that dog Yusef has his classmates spy while the two show themselves to each other. All this is fresh and authentic. The trouble starts with Stevie's arrival at high school, which coincides with the black is beautiful'' period (it's 1967). Here, the flow is disrupted by obvious setups intended to make points about race and sexual orientation. Stevie and Carla happen on their white art-teacher having a date with a black man--puppets miming the interracial experimentation of the period. At school, the sympathetic Nurse Horn puts Stevie in a quandary: Is it possible to be friends with a white woman, who may even befunny'' (lesbian)? The question overshadows Stevie's almost consummated relationship with Sean, a straight-arrow senior, and although the good nurse answers it in best Ann Landers style (``because you have a schoolgirl crush on me doesn't make you a homosexual''), Stevie ends up dwarfed by her author's agenda. Sinclair's story works fine when she gives her characters room to breathe. A fair-to-middling debut. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.