Offering no easy answers, Woodson teaches the reader that love can lead to acceptance of all manner of differences. She shatters stereotypes even as she evokes the tenderness of a mother/son relationship. Through Melanin's voice, Woodson frankly expresses the resentment and confusion of an adolescent desperately struggling to reestablish normalcy. His shock and sense of alienation are quickly exacerbated when the neighbors begin to gossip and he becomes the object of cruel taunts. ``You're a dyke! A dyke!'' he screams at her, enraged.
At age 13, Melanin Sun, an African American boy growing up in Brooklyn with his single mother, sometimes longs for the days when life was as ``simple as chocolate cakes and Lego sets.'' Instead, his feelings grow more complicated after his mother explains that she is gay and in love with Kristin, the white woman whom she has recently invited home. Notable Tweens: Melanin- The main character of the story, which is told in his voice.
Most of all, I wanted to write about three brothers who are funny, handsome, searching, and caring of one another.Woodson's (I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This) perceptively wrought novel imaginatively tackles such weighty issues as racism and sexuality. The Notebooks of Melanin Sun is a great book for any tween who learns his or her parent is gay for the first time and is having a difficult time coping, or for a friend of such a tween who wants to understand what their friend is experiencing. I also wanted to write about how hard it is to lose someone you love-in this case, both parents-and how that pain starts shaping itself into other things sometimes like anger and isolation. I also wanted to write about how hard it is to be poor sometimes. I wanted to write a story that had no girls in it. Whidbey Island which is off the coast of Seattle, Washington and in Olivebridge, NY Why I wrote it: In the Washington Heights section of Manhattan Where I wrote it:
Twelve-year-old Lafayette tells the story of what happens to him and his older brothers, fifteen-year-old Charlie and twenty-one-year-old Ty’ree, after Charlie comes home from a juvenile detention center where he has spent time for armed robbery. Three brothers who are orphaned by the death of their mother, are trying to get by.
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