87
Books:
For Kids
The Skin I’m In
by Sharon G. Flake
(pub. 2001, Jump At The Sun
176 pages, £4.99)
The real black beauty
Loving yourself when all around you seem set on
putting you down isn’t an easy thing to do. Matt
Taylor takes a look at a novel which examines
the issues through the eyes of a young girl.
Forget Harry Potter. Maleeka
Madison, who will soon be your
heroine as well as mine, is a whole
lot better. Although aimed at
teenagers, this is a book for
everyone.
First off, this book is magical. It
takes the joys and struggles of a
young girl and delicately traces
how she learns to love herself and,
as her late father used to say to,
“see yourself with your own eyes.”
This is the story of Maleeka
Madison. Her Daddy is dead. Her
Momma is depressed and only
keeps going through endless
sewing, creating a stream of ugly
clothes which earn Maleeka daily
taunts at school. But clothes are
not Maleeka’s biggest problem. Like
all her classmates, she’s black. But
not just the brown that white folks
call black, she’s real black, “like a
blue-black sky after it’s rained and
rained”, and the other children spy
their chance to bully someone
‘worse off’ than themselves.
Luckily for Maleeka there’s a new
teacher at her school, Miss Michael
Saunders. Not only does Miss
Saunders have a man’s name, to
Maleeka’s great disapproval but she
also has a facial disfigurement,
“like someone tossed acid on it”.
This might be tolerable except that
Miss Saunders doesn’t have the
decency to be ashamed. She
knows she’s different, but she
thinks that’s OK.
As the story unfolds, Miss
Saunders begins quietly to help
Maleeka start valuing herself. This
doesn’t happen overnight. More
satisfyingly it occurs in stages with
some steps forward and several
back. There’s the class discussion
on, “What does your face say to
the world?” There’s the extra
assignment in which Maleeka
creates the diary of ‘Akeelma’, a
slave-girl. As the anagrammed
name of the character suggests,
she and Maleeka have a lot in
common, and the diary becomes
a key feature in Maleeka’s journey.
There’s also the clever way Miss
Saunders turns even the need for
punishment to advantage by fixing
Maleeka with a job in the school
office (which nurtures her fledgling
self-esteem) to ‘pay back’ for her
involvement in a fight with a bully.
As any woman (and several men)
will tell you, when Maleeka
decides to change her hairstyle,
you just know that other deeper
changes are on the way. I won’t
spoil any of the pleasure of
discovering just what happens
next and how it comes about, but
by the end of the novel you’ll be
left in no doubt why it won a
Coretta Scott King Award when
first published. Personally, I can’t
understand why no one has
wanted to make it into a film.