Imani All Mine

""The doctor say she see it every day, babies having babies."" Fifteen-year-old Tasha Dawson narrates a tale of teenage motherhood in Porter's second adult novel (after All-Bright Court). Balancing her honor-roll grades with the perils of surviving inner-city Buffalo, N.Y., Tasha gives birth to Imani--a child conceived in violence and given a name that means ""faith."" . The young mother expresses a powerful, protective love for her daughter even as she herself negotiates her existence among drug dealers and bigoted authorities and explores her own adolescent sexuality. She struggles to understand her mother's new relationship with a white man; her own desires, shame and pride; and the nature of a God who is both merciless and loved. Just when Tasha appears to have found a place for herself with Imani and in school, her world is devastated by a flash of injustice that changes her life forever. Porter spins the tale in a series of flashbacks, telling Tasha's story in a nonlinear fashion and with a bold dialect, mirroring the survival strategies of indirection that Tasha employs in her complex navigation of young adulthood, motherhood and urban life. Porter is also known as a young-adult fiction writer (the Addy books in the American Girls series), and at times this novel slips uncomfortably into YA simplicity, especially in its resolutely uplifting final scenes, which offer an almost cloyingly spiritual happy ending to Tasha's complicated, earthbound story. Author tour. (Jan.)