A black girl's difficult growing up in New York. The family comprises an alcoholic father, a promiscuous mother, a brother who is a homosexual, a second brother who abuses women and a third who is illegitimate and has blue eyes. The saving grace is an idealistic sister. By the author of I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This. Set in Brooklyn mostly during the Vietnam war, the story opens on a nameless black narrator, who's in the fifth grade, and her four siblings, then lets 12 years pass like gray pages of a tabloid.
Chapters come in small chunks broken off from the narrator's nerve-tossed heart.
Her gay eldest brother, Troy, spends his last night home before going to Vietnam prancing around the kids' bedroom in his mother's high heels. Her third brother, Carlos, has blue eyes whose origin baffles him, and her mother falls into a bad mood and for a week saturates herself with a new Al Green record. Nearly every stage of the narrator's growth is a kind of death, though punctuated by falling in love and by traveling to Coney Island, Cape Cod and the Statue of Liberty. Troy comes home in a casket. Daddy drinks, beats Mama, slips off.