Despite being a straight-A student and voracious reader, nine-year old Sandrine Miller is treated like a servant by her mother, who forces Sandrine to clean the house, do chores and take care of her younger half sister, Yolanda. On top of the despair of her life at home, Sandrine must confront the harshness of life in mid-1970s New Orleans, where older men prey on young girls and she is ostracized because she is a light-skinned black girl. The only refuge against her bleak world is spending summers with her beloved grandmother, Mamalita. After Mamalita’s death, Sandrine realizes that she must escape from her mother, from New Orleans, from everything she has ever known, if she is to have any kind of future. In the tradition of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow is a brilliant and uplifting debut from an important new voice in African-American fiction.
