Something Kindred

Seventeen-year-old Jericka is a budding Black photographer in New Jersey who dreams of attending Parsons for college. Her plans to spend the summer completing her admissions application and avoiding her boyfriend as he prepares to head to Howard are dashed when Jericka’s flighty mother drags her to her hometown of Coldwater, Md. There, the grandmother Jericka has never known, who abandoned Jericka’s mother and uncle as children, is dying of cancer. In Coldwater, Jericka’s understanding of her own past is uprooted when she’s reunited with the absentee father she hasn’t seen in 14 years. She is further shaken by a local lesbian teen known for communing with “echoes” of Coldwater’s restless dead, who compels Jericka to rethink her floundering relationship back home. As Jericka confronts long-buried feelings of abandonment and stagnation, compassion proves the linchpin of this lightly romantic tale of reconciliation with family and self. In an emotionally charged debut that’s both bracing and sentimental, Burch composes an intimate generational portrait of a family of Black women who are tethered by their roots and grappling with the painful and permanent consequences of their efforts to break free from their histories. Ages 12–up. (Apr.)