Sixteen-year-old Suzette — "Little" — returns to Los Angeles for the summer from the New England boarding school she was sent to after her stepbrother Lionel, "Lion," was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The blended family she comes home to — Suzette and her mother are Black; Lionel and his father are white and Jewish, a faith Suzette has made her own — still revolves around Lionel's illness, and he soon confides that he has stopped taking his medication and asks her to keep it secret. Torn between loyalty to the brother she has always been closest to and fear of what his secret could cost him, Suzette is also navigating her own identity: she is bisexual, still bruised by the way her relationship with her boarding-school roommate was exposed, and now finds herself drawn both to her old friend Emil and to Rafaela, the girl Lionel is falling for himself. The novel won the 2018 Stonewall Book Award for children's and young adult literature.
Author: Brandy Colbert · Original publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (New York), 2017
