"When did we lose them? It's a question that would haunt journalist Dawn Turner for much of her life. Her quest to understand what happened to her sister and best friend yields an unforgetttable story about the forces that shape our destinies"-- Dust jacket flap.
"They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong as they come; and Dawn's best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded ... as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood in Chicago's South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration came of age in the 1970s, in the warm glow of the recent civil rights movement ... Their striving working-class parents are eager for them to realize this hard-fought potential. But the girls have much more immediate concerns: hiding under the dining room table and eavesdropping on grown folks' business, collecting secret treasures, and daydreaming about their futures--Dawn and Debra want to be doctors, Kim a teacher. For a brief, wondrous moment the girls are all giggles and dreams and promises of 'friends forever.' Then they arrive at a precipice, a fraught rite of passage for all girls when the dangers and the harsh realities of the world burst the innocent bubble of childhood, when the choices they make can--and will--have devastating consequences"--Dust jacket flap.
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