From one of the most powerful voices of her generation: the story of a childhood defined by race, poverty and a father in prison.
'If family was everything, the source of all that was needed to complete the picture, I was a wilfully missing piece of the puzzle...'
Throughout her adolescence, Ashley Ford doesn't know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. She is already coping with growing up in a struggling single-parent home in Indiana and navigating her fraught relationship with her difficult, demanding mother. If only she could turn to her father for his advice and support. But he's in prison, and she doesn't know what he did to end up there.
In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates. When the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley desperately searches for her sense of self. Then, her grandmother reveals the truth about her father's incarceration... and Ashley's world is turned upside down.
As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she embarks on a powerful journey to find the connections between who she is and what she was born into, arriving at the realisation that, however much we might try to untether ourselves from a painful past, the ties that bind families together are the strongest ones of all.
