SuitabookKendra
Coe Booth
- Reading
- Read alongside the young person rather than treating the grandmother’s rules or Adonna’s teasing as automatically right. Pause after family confrontations, ask whose perspective is missing, and revisit how Kendra’s ambitions develop.
- Themes
- Family care and separation: Kendra lives with her grandmother while her mother completes a PhD, and hopes her mother will return after finding work. The situation is presented through Kendra’s divided feelings: she wants change but must live with her grandmother’s authority. The excerpt does not settle whose choices are fairest.
- Growing independence: Kendra is starting high school, attends play practice, sketches house plans and negotiates conversations about friendship and romantic interest. The book’s stance on this remains unclear.
- Worth knowing
- Be ready for family separation or delayed reunification, controlling household expectations, conflict between relatives, teasing, profanity, references to menstruation and sexualised clothing, and discussion of romantic or sexual relationships. Their later treatment and consequences are not established.