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What the Fireflies Knew
A tender coming of age story that unfolds over the course of a single summer. Our narrator is 10-year-old Kenyatta, whose family is in upheaval. After her father dies from an overdose and the family loses their Detroit home, her mother sends her and her older sister to live with their grandfather in Lansing, for reasons that, though unclear, are plenty scary to young KB. While Nia seems to slip easily into Lansing life, KB struggles to find her place, unsettled by the discovery her world and her family are more complex and frightening than she once believed them to be. A moving exploration of family, identity, and race that piercingly evokes the pains and pleasures of childhood summer days. Harris beautifully voiced her young book-loving protagonist and the many references to Anne of Green Gables were apt and touching. Content warnings apply. For fans of Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and Gail Godwin’s Grief Cottage.
About the Book
“Harris rewrites the coming-of-age story with Black girlhood at the center.”
—New York Times Book Review
In the vein of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel told by almost-eleven-year-old Kenyatta Bernice (KB), as she and her sister try to make sense of their new life with their estranged grandfather in the wake of their father’s death and their mother’s disappearance.
An ode to Black girlhood and adolescence as seen through KB’s eyes, What the Fireflies Knew follows KB after her father dies of an overdose and the debts incurred from his addiction cause the loss of the family home in Detroit. Soon thereafter, KB and her teenage sister, Nia, are sent by their overwhelmed mother to live with their estranged grandfather in Lansing, Michigan. Over the course of a single sweltering summer, KB attempts to navigate a world that has turned upside down.
Her father has been labeled a fiend. Her mother’s smile no longer reaches her eyes. Her sister, once her best friend, now feels like a stranger. Her grandfather is grumpy and silent. The white kids who live across the street are friendly, but only sometimes. And they’re all keeping secrets. As KB vacillates between resentment, abandonment, and loneliness, she is forced to carve out a different identity for herself and find her own voice.
A dazzling and moving novel about family, identity, and race, What the Fireflies Knew poignantly reveals that heartbreaking but necessary component of growing up–the realization that loved ones can be flawed and that the perfect family we all dream of looks different up close.
Other books in "Literary Tourism: Michigan"
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