Through a teen"s angry first-person narrative, adult writer Benedict"s debut YA novel confronts harsh contemporary issues of vicious racism and child abuse. Smart and beautiful, Madge, 17, never knew her Jamaican dad, and has had to cope with her irresponsible white mom, an illegal alien in the U.S. Madge gets support from her aunt and from a small circle of friends, especially her classmate and boyfriend, Krishna (with whom she has great sex). But the prejudice is ugly in her run-down white Pennsylvanian town, and when she rescues an abandoned black foster kid, four-year-old Timmy, she wonders if she"s doing the right thing by bringing him home. Family is the heart of the novel, with Benedict delivering an unsentimental view of how hard it is to care for a needy child, as well as a sense of the tenderness that holds Madge and Timmy together.