Welcome to Windows & Mirrors, where we feature books that provide us windows to lives outside our own and mirrors to our shared common human experiences.

Today we are featuring PRIDE by IBI ZOBOI.

Zuri is the second oldest of five sisters in their family living in The Bushwick region of Brooklyn. Her older sister is coming home from college for the summer after her freshman year and this SHOULD be the happiest of days for Zuri, but there are big changes happening around her, distracting her from bliss. New neighbors are moving in to the brand-new mini-mansion across the street from their decaying old apartment building. Zuri instantly hates the boy neighbors who are her age, even though they are drop dead gorgeous, because she knows they’re not like her and she’s worried that their glorious new mansion means the end for her beloved neighborhood-where everyone knows and looks out for one another and neighbors get together regularly for block parties, lining the streets with cooking grills.

ZURI builds a fortress around her heart, desperately holding on to all that is dear to her, and can’t help but feel angry with herself once she begins to fall for the new neighbor boy she’s tried so hard to hate. Can Zuri make peace with the changes swirling around her and open herself up to love and be loved?

Fans of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE will delight in Zoboi’s modern, highly-relevant remix of the classic with a full POC cast and Zuri’s fresh, beautiful voice. (Dare I say, I loved it more? Why, yes I do!) I was a bit worried PRIDE would be too much of a love story to keep my interest, but really it’s about personal growth and realizing that the barriers we put up to protect ourselves sometimes do unintentional harm. Zoboi’s character development is magical. Zuri’s Haitian-Dominican family is loud, messy, vibrant, and totally relatable. I adored them all! I loved Zuri as deeply as a sister. She’s very self-aware, which helps guide her to make good decisions, but most importantly she lives and loves deeply, fiercely, and with PRIDE.

So many aspects of this story remind me of a mash-up of THE VANDERBEEKERS OF 141^stSTREET, another recent favorite story of mine, and Zoboi’s amazing debut AMERICAN STREET!

PRIDE released on September 18. Head to your favorite bookstore today or request it from your library. Even though I rarely reread books, I’m very eager to read the audiobook, narrated by my poet crush Elizabeth Acevedo (author of The Poet X).

From Ibi Zoboi’s website:

Ibi Aanu Zoboi was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and is a graduate of the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Her short story, “Old Flesh Song”, is published in the award-winning Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, a collection of African American speculative fiction. Ibi received an award from theWomen Writers of Haitian Descent for her short story “At the Shores of Dawn”, which was published in One?Respe! literary journal.  She won a “Tricky Talker of the Year” an annual tall-tale contest presented by the Afrikan Folk Heritage Circle.

Her children’s fable, “Mama Kwanzaa & Her Seven Children”, was published in African Voices Magazine. She designed and taught a course on female archetypes in world mythology to the young women of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project where she also taught creative writing and leadership classes and she’s been a volunteer mentor with Girls Write Now, Inc. Ibi presented a paper entitled, “Oya’s Brood: Mythology and the African American Woman” for a symposium on Octavia Butler at the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College.

She is a recipient of a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council for her original program, the Daughters of Anacaona Writing Project, partnering with local organizations Dwa Fanm, Inc. andHaiti Cultural Exchange in Brooklyn, and Fondasyon Felicite in Haiti to conduct a 3-day workshop with teen girls in Port-au-Prince. Ibi has completed a teen fantasy novel based on Haitian myth and folklore. Her short story “The Harem” is recently published in Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat.

She’s a recent winner of the Gulliver Travel Grant given annually by the Speculative Literature Foundation and holds an MFA in Writng for Children & Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Her debut novel, AMERICAN STREET, was published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers and has received five starred reviews. Her next YA novel, PRIDE, is due out in the Fall of 2018. Her middle grade debut, MY LIFE AS AN ICE-CREAM SANDWICH is forthcoming from Dutton/Penguin Books.

Ibi lives in Brooklyn with her husband, visual artist  and educator Joseph Zoboi, and their three young children.

Posted by Michelle Leonard.