Five-time Coretta Scott King Award recipient Sharon M. Draper (Out of My Mind, Stella by Starlight, Panic) offers a timely middle-grade novel that addresses divorce, racism and identity in her trademark empathic and accessible style.Isabella Badia Thornton is an exceptional pianist, has two fabulous best friends, is obsessed with making glitter slime, and has loving, supportive parents. Unfortunately, her parents are not so loving with each other anymore--when Isabella was eight, they divorced. The adjustment was challenging, of course, but now Isabella (or Izzy, as her mom calls her) is 11, and things have gotten rougher. Her dad, who had been living in California, moved back to Ohio last year and the court has ordered that she spend alternating weeks with each parent: "Sunday, at exactly 3:00 p.m., in front of the Apple Store at the mall, I am exchanged like a wrong-size pair of jeans.... they love me and all that, but it doesn't stop them from slicing my life in half every seven days." Her parents are fighting more than ever and the tension is unbearable, especially when both make plans to marry their new partners on the same day.
Underneath the stress of feuding parents, however, is Izzy's dawning awareness that having a black father and a white mother brings an array of complications. "Do you think people think I'm black or white when they see me? Am I black? Or white?" she asks her father. He replies, koan-like, "Yes." And when her black friend Imani finds a noose in her locker after a classroom discussion about lynching, the issue is suddenly even more immediate. "What if next time someone hurts Imani, like physically?" Izzy wonders. "Or someone else? Who looks like her. Who looks like...."
When she considers herself in the mirror, Izzy sees both her parents. "It's like half of Dad and half of Mom got put in a blender, and the churned-up result was me," she says. But a blended family is not as smooth a mix. The back-and-forth trudge between households is disruptive and confusing. "The real me?" she asks. "I have no idea who that is. Especially since there's pretty much two of me."
As Isabella, cheerful by nature, struggles to navigate the year's challenges, she finds solace in practicing for an important recital, not unaware of the symbolism of the keys of her instrument. "Using only my fingers, I can make the black and white keys dance together and do whatever I want," she thinks.
Blended is a graceful novel about family and identity that will enlighten and entertain readers. Draper's insight into the world of an 11-year-old girl is uncanny. Isabella is by turns silly and bewildered, anxious and confident. But when a racial incident even more shocking than the noose throws her life into the media "horror story of the day," Izzy's family finally pulls together like a Beethoven sonata: "White keys./ Black keys./ Blended perfectly." --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: An ebullient 11-year-old struggles to inhabit her identity as the child of divorced parents--one black, one white--as racist incidents in her community creep ever closer to her own world.