collected
Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Children's
About 3 h 30 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 8 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
At McClenton Middle School, thirteen-year-old Maleeka Madison does Charlese's homework in exchange for borrowed clothes and a place in her group, yet still faces bullying over her dark skin, good grades and homemade clothes. Her new English teacher, Miss Saunders, has a large white patch on her face, and Maleeka assumes she will become another target. Instead, the teacher's confidence challenges Maleeka's ideas about herself, while her encouragement draws out Maleeka's hidden talent for writing.
Maleeka tells this YA novel in an informal, conversational voice, interspersed with her school assignment about an enslaved girl. The school setting includes sustained emotional abuse and colorism, making acceptance by classmates a painful bargain.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
No, Maleeka’s informal, conversational voice and the linear story make it accessible. Her narration is interspersed with a school assignment about an enslaved girl; the sustained bullying is more demanding emotionally than the prose is to follow.
Strong emotional abuse and colorism are central: Maleeka faces sustained bullying over her dark skin, good grades and homemade clothes. She does Charlese’s homework in exchange for borrowed clothes and a place in her group, making acceptance a painful bargain.
Yes, hope comes through Miss Saunders’s confidence and her encouragement of Maleeka’s writing. The tone is also intimate and tense, with Maleeka’s growing sense of herself set against the pressure to gain acceptance from classmates.
It suits readers looking for a character-focused YA coming-of-age story about identity, friendship and racism. Maleeka’s school relationships and her response to a confident teacher give those themes a personal, everyday setting.
About 176 pages in the Jump At The Sun 2007 edition.
Jump At The Sun · 2007 · Paperback. ISBN 9781423103851.
1. The Skin I'm In.
About 3 hours 30 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 176-page Jump At The Sun edition. Dense books can take longer.
Sharon G. Flake is an American writer of children’s and young adult literature whose fiction centers the inner lives of Black adolescents. Since her 1998 debut, The Skin I’m In, she has written about young people confronting colorism, poverty, family strain, social pressure, and the uncertainties of intimacy without allowing those pressures to define them completely. Her characteristic mode is direct and conversational, with dialogue and close attention to relationships carrying much of the emotional work. The Skin I’m In follows a girl learning to resist judgments about her dark skin, while Money Hungry gives a thirteen-year-old’s pursuit of financial security the urgency of possible homelessness. The stories in Who Am I Without Him? extend Flake’s interest in self-knowledge through teenage romance and its mismatched expectations. In the verse novel Once in a Blue Moon, she broadens her range to rural North Carolina in the 1930s, drawing on family history while preserving her intimate focus on a young person’s fears and desires.
The catalog does not yet include a matching edition. Details may differ between editions.
