"Harriet Tubman was brave and strong, and she was black like me. I think it was the first time I thought of wanting to be called Harriet - I wanted to be Harriet." Margaret is determined to be someone, to be cool, with style and class and have a blacker skin. More than anything she wants to help her best friend, Zulma, escape from Canada and fly back to Tobago to live with her grandmother. She compiles a list: "Things I want changed in my life" and set about achieving her objectives. But at fourteen, coming to terms with growing up, relationships, and responsibilities is not quite so straightforward, and the parental threat of "Good West Indian Discipline" is never far removed. In this charming, humorous, and perceptive tale of adolescence, Marlene Nourbese Philip explores the friendship of two young black girls and throws into sharp relief the wider issues of culture and identity so relevant to teenagers of all races and colours.

M. NourbeSe Philip is the author of the play Coups and Calypsos, two novels, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, and Harriet's Daughter (Heinemann; The Women's Press); three non-fiction works, Frontiers, Showing Grit, and A Genealogy of Resistance; and three books of poetry, including She Tries Her Tongue and Her Silence Softly Breaks, winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize. She is a Fellow in Poetry of the Guggenheim Foundation, and recipient of the Toronto Arts Award for Literature.

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