Clouds over California
Stevie, a shy sixth grader, has just moved to a new neighborhood and school in the Los Angeles area in the early 1970s. Biracial, with a Black mother and a white father, she is the only student of color in her class. Class bullies make fun of her hair while the other kids ignore her. Even worse, her best friend from her old school won’t return her phone calls. Her parents are fighting, her mother may be having an affair with a Black librarian named Clarence, and her father, a former CIA operative, is secretly recording all her mother’s phone calls. Despite the instability of her parents’ marriage, they’re now the guardians of Stevie’s fifteen-year-old cousin, Naomi, whose widowed mother in Boston can’t handle her. Naomi has her own secrets—she’s dating a boy involved with the Black Panthers and volunteers with the group’s childcare program after school.
Period detail, major historical and cultural figures, and slang root this story in a time and place in which women’s roles were rapidly changing. Stevie’s father wants a traditional marriage with a stay-at-home wife who cooks and takes care of the children, and Stevie’s very conservative aunts (her mother’s two sisters) reinforce him in these beliefs. But Stevie’s mother and cousin see education and political activism respectively as means of expanding their place in the world. Stevie is drawn to a sporty white classmate, and through her budding friendship with Ally, she develops confidence. Will sports be the means by which she asserts herself? Parsons leaves the possibility open, showing middle-grade readers the multiple ways in which women fought for equality during this tumultuous decade.
