Rachel M Harper

"Raised by a single mother in Miami, Florida, Jenry Castillo, newly arrived at Brown University on a music scholarship, finds himself searching for information about his late father Jasper Patterson, an internationally recognized principal ballet dancer who died tragically when Jenry was two. Jenry thinks his estranged grandfather, Winston Patterson, a professor of African American history at Brown and a titan in his field, might have the answers...

Rachel Harper's debut novel has won praise for its vivid protrayal of a mixed-race girl coming of age in a family that's falling apart. Nellie's white mother and black father are breaking up. Nellie, whose black skin and blonde hair have always made her feel like an outsider, feels even more out of place traveling across the country with her dark-skinned dad, taking her white, sassy cousin Jess to meet her own father. But they might have more in common...