Diamond is the only Black person left in Swift River, now
that her father has disappeared. She is
a 300-pound teenager who lives with her white mother. She has never met any of her father’s family,
but she gets to know them via letters that start arriving from her father’s
cousin Lena. Since her mother does not
drive, forcing them to hitchhike from place to place, Diamond has been tucking
away some of her earnings from her job at the local motel so that she can take
driving lessons. She has aced the written
test and now finds herself practicing driving along with her classmate Shelly
under the tutelage of a frisky young man. This would all be funny if it weren’t
so sad—Diamond’s eating habits, her loneliness, her mother’s poor judgment, and
especially the uncertainty of her father’s whereabouts. He is presumed dead, but Diamond and her
mother have had to wait seven years to obtain a death certificate that will
free up his life insurance money. In one
flashback Diamond’s father gives her a $100 bill when she loses a tooth while
they are away from home. This is not a
family that can afford tooth fairy gifts of $100, and I did not understand why
her father did this. Diamond and her
mother are both shocked, but the ultimate fate of the $100 bill is even weirder. Thanks to superb writing, though, this book
was a joy to read. On the one hand, I
did not love having most of Diamond’s family history conveyed via sometimes
lengthy letters that appear in the book.Â
However, this technique limited the number of timelines in the rest of
the narrative to just stuff that happened during Diamond’s lifetime and made it
easy to recognize what was ancient history.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.