Tami Charles

A lyrical, heart-lifting love letter to Black and Brown children everywhere reminds them how much they matter, that they have always mattered and they always will.

"In the hills above Port-au-Prince, a young girl named Fallon wants more than anything to carry a large woven basket to the market, just like her Manman. As she watches her mother wrap her hair in a mouchwa, Fallon tries to twist her own braids into a scarf and balance the empty panye atop her head, but realizes it's much harder than she thought"--

Zuri Ray loves trying extraordinary new things but when Jessie, her Best Friend From Diapers, chooses ballet Zuri Ray finds it too challenging until the teacher encourages her to be herself.

"For seventeen-year-old Denver, music is everything. Writing, performing, and her ultimate goal: escaping her very small, very white hometown. So Denver is more than ready on the day she and her best friends Dali and Shak sing their way into the orbit of the biggest R&B star in the world, Sean Mercury Ellis. Merc gives them everything: parties, perks, wild nights -- plus hours and hours in the recording studio. Even the painful sacrifices and the...

Annabelle Louis, military brat and computer nerd, embarks on her second assignment in making friends in middle school trying out for the school play where, despite what she feels is her total lack of ability, she ends up as understudy for the lead female part, and with more fuel for her popular vlog, Daphne Doesn't--but Annabelle begins to realize that being popular in secret will not mean anything if she can not share her secret with her friends....

When thirteen-year-old Annabelle's mother gets her to dress up a little, she suddenly finds herself eating and shopping with the Rachael and the other "cool" girls, but also loosing the friends, like John, that she had already made; so, disgusted by what fashion is doing to her, she uses her vlog, Daphne Doesn't, to make fun of it all and get back to her true self--but Rachael has figured out who Daphne is, and it looks like Annabelle's secret identity...

It is 1983 and Vanessa Martin, a thirteen-year-old African American girl in Newark's public housing, dreams of following in the footsteps of the first black Miss America, Vanessa Williams; but with a dysfunctional family (mother in jail, father withdrawn, drunken grandfather, gay cousin) the odds are against her--until a new teacher at school organizes a beauty pageant and encourages Vanessa to enter.