“The tenderness and truth of the book moved my heart. As well as the enormous love.” – Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple Joan Steinau Lester‚Äôs newest book looks that the emotional and social experience of Nina, a teen girl living in LA who feels caught between two worlds‚Äîthe ‚Äúwhite‚Äù world of her mother and the ‚Äúblack‚Äù world of her father. This nowhere land of race becomes harder to navigate when the support system her parents offered is shattered by their divorce. Now with racial tensions rising in her school and community, her white friends seeing her as too ghetto and her black friends labeling her too white, and her father pressuring her to take up her black heritage, Nina feels lost and abandoned. Even Nina‚Äôs faith seems to fail her‚Äîhow can she cling to God and the songs of the church when God‚Äôs image in her seems twisted? When Nina discovers a book her father is writing about Sarah, her great-great grandmother who escaped from slavery on the Underground Railroad, Nina finds someone who can understand her feelings of being trapped in an upside-down world. But will those stories be enough to guide Nina through the pressures she now faces?

A stunning tale about the deeply entrenched conflicts between a white mother and her biracial daughter. Mama’ s Child is story of an idealistic young white woman who travelled to the American South as a civil rights worker, fell in love with an African American man, and started a family in San Francisco, where the more liberal city embraced them– except when it didn’ t. They raise a son and daughter, but the tensions surrounding them have a negative impact on their marriage, and they divorce when their children are still young. For their biracial daughter, this split further destabilizes her already challenged sense of self–” Am I black or white?” she must ask herself, ” Where do I belong?” Is she her father’ s daughter alone? As the years pass, the chasm between them widens, even as the mother attempts to hold on to the emotional chord that binds them. It isn’ t until the daughter, Ruby, herself becomes a wife and mother that she begins to develop compassion and understanding for the many ways that her own mother’ s love transcended race and questions of identity.