A Friendship For Today
Starred Review.McKissack (Porch Lies) reaches into  her own childhood to shape this immediate and affecting novel narrated by  strong and smart Rosemary. She enters sixth grade in 1954, just after her  Missouri town acts upon the Supreme Court school desegregation decision and  closes the "colored school" the girl has attended. Since her best friend, J.J.,  contracts polio just before school starts, Rosemary is the only black child in  her class at her new school. Her first day, she wears a pink dress with lace,  while the other kids have on pants and tennis shoes ("She looks like one of  those dressed-up monkeys they have at the zoo," a classmate says). And her  assigned seat is right next to Grace, her neighborhood nemesis, who comes from  a racist family ("They hate colored people and don't mind telling us"). The  graceful narrative splices together several survival stories, as Rosemary copes  with her peers' prejudice and her parents' disintegrating marriage, and J.J.  endures grueling polio treatments. One of the tale's most poignant threads is  the evolving friendship between Rosemary and Grace; in an especially incisive  passage, after Grace confides that her abusive father believes white people are  superior, Rosemary asks, "You know better, don't you?" to which Grace answers  "Now I do." Rosemary replies, "That's what counts with me." A real, at times  raw tale about a winning and insightful young heroine during a bittersweet era.  Ages 9-12.(Jan.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.