Twelve-year-old Ebony-Grace Norfleet Freeman lives in Huntsville, Alabama, with her mother and her grandfather Jeremiah, one of the first Black engineers at NASA, who has raised her on Star Trek, Star Wars, and the conviction that the stars are hers. In the summer of 1984, with her grandfather beset by an unspecified trouble, she is sent to spend the season with the father she hardly knows in Harlem โ "No Joke City," as she names it. The Harlem girls she meets, devoted to double Dutch, break dancing, and the rising sound of hip-hop, find her strange, and tag her with the book's title: chocolate on the outside, vanilla on the inside. Ebony-Grace retreats into what she calls her imagination location, recasting herself as Cadet E-Grace Starfleet aboard the Mothership Uhura, on a mission to rescue her grandfather โ Captain Fleet โ and recasting Harlem itself as a starfield she must learn to navigate. Slowly the two worlds merge: the neighborhood's own music and movement turn out to be a frontier as real as any she imagined, and by summer's end she has found her place in both. The novel is a coming-of-age story about imagination as both refuge and bridge, from the National Book Award finalist author of American Street.
Author: Ibi Zoboi ยท Original publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers (New York), 2019
