Georgiana "G-baby" Matthews has what seems like the weight of the world on her 11-year-old shoulders. Her mother's recent remarriage has meant a summer move to the suburbs and away from Atlanta and her best friend, Nikki; come fall, G-baby will have to go to a new school. The move also means a new stepsister for G-baby: Tangie, an ornery teen whose younger sister died in a car crash and who can't be bothered with her new stepfamily. It's while G-baby and her six-year-old sister, Peaches, are back in Atlanta visiting their dad and new stepmom, Millicent, that the freshly formed family threatens to unravel.While G-baby is off with Nikki, having snuck out of Daddy and Millicent's house in the night, Peaches becomes sick enough to require hospitalization; she's ultimately given a bacterial meningitis diagnosis. G-baby laments that she wasn't there for her sister, who she knew had been feeling ill. And G-baby knows that things don't always end well for young children: "It was possible that little sisters go away and never come back," she reflects. "It happened to Tangie's li'l sister."
Blended family stories and sick sibling sagas are nothing new in middle-grade fiction, but with her debut novel, Leslie C. Youngblood makes this turf her own. Love Like Sky references Charlie Brown, the Kardashians and other pop culture touchstones familiar to most middle schoolers, but the book also name checks Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown--names that a black "almost-teenager" like G-baby would surely know. There's a current of racial awareness running through Love Like Sky that's presented as part of the fabric of a black family's life, as when a sheepish Millicent explains her kitchen's cartoon decor to G-baby: "When I found out that the character of Betty Boop was stolen from a black woman, Esther Jones, I went a little overboard." This thread helps prime readers for G-baby's agonizing decision: whether to snitch on Tangie, who plans to defy her father and attend a Black Lives Matter-like protest.
G-baby’s narration winningly shows off her powers of perception ("I could tell a fake smile from a real one. Mama and Daddy's separation made me an expert, especially when we'd have family dinner and they'd wear their mannequin smiles") while also leaning on a few clichés: knees shake, lips are bitten, eyes are rolled. These edges are softened by Love Like Sky's abiding warmth, captured in its title--a reference to the sky-high love that G-baby knows her mother and father feel for her. By book's end, she understands that they're hardly the only ones. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author
Shelf Talker: Leslie C. Youngblood's debut middle grade novel revolves around black "almost-teenager" G-baby and her newly blended family, which faces typical middle-class problems--and then some.