Brother and the Dancer
African American adolescents growing up only a few miles apart in the city of Highland in the San Bernardino Valley, Erycha and Touissant nonetheless live very different lives. Hers is a life of poverty, uncertainty, and the violence played out in the unstable coupling of her parents. She’s a curvy black girl attracted to ballet, which she later swaps for the “home truth” of stepping. He is the adored son of middle-class parents who’ve already sent twin daughters to USC and have high hopes for a manchild named for the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint-Louverture. But he finds solace in brutal stereotypes of football-versus-academics and surreptitiously travels the few miles to the ghetto in search of what it means to be black. In alternating chapters, Norris chronicles their separate lives and occasional overlaps, which are strikingly penetrating in portraying class divisions that override the extravagant multicultural and multiracial landscape of California. This first novel works as both a beautifully written description of emotional and physical landscapes and a dreamlike chronicle of the days and dreams of adolescents coming of age. --Vanessa Bush--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.