So Powerful

We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza is a powerful and heartbreaking contemporary story. If you only read one book this year – make sure it is We Are Not Like Them.

This is a book about friendship. This is a book about lives. This is a book about racial injustice. It is racial injustice that African Americans face every day of their lives. It is heartbreaking and it needs to change.

The book is about a friendship between two girls who grew up together – one black and one white. They were inseparable. “Sometimes you just need to be around someone who loved you before you were a fully formed person.” Their friendship is strong – until the day it is tested to the limits.

Being a young black man in America is dangerous. The novel explores the horrors that are faced daily.

The opening of the novel is shocking and heartbreaking. It sets the tone for what is to come.

It is awful to see people still being judged by the colour of their skin. “My good grades don’t matter… how faithful I was, how kind, none of it could ever erase the fact that people were going to hate me.” This is wrong. This has always been wrong. When will we learn to love people for who they are?

The authors reinforce the message that racial prejudice has never gone away as we hear of a terrible lynching fifty years earlier. “They just keep killing us” is a heartbreaking cry of a grandmother.