Autobiography of a Family Photo by Jacqueline Woodson

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. Chapters come in small chunks broken off from the narrator's nerve-tossed heart. Her new baby brother, Cory, is half white. 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. --