Blackberries and Cream

by Leslie Rivver

Overview

Have you ever had the feeling you weren’t loved by the momma God gave you?  Lucky for Gracie, she has two mommas.  One cares for her every day while the other goes off to work.  One is happy, strong and free while the other is sad, dark and depressed.  One is black.  The other is white.  One Gracie must leave.  

Grace Callaway lives down deep in Alabama during a turbulent time of protests, boycotts, and sit-ins.  It is a segregated world where black and white won’t mix.  But don’t tell that to Ida Bell and Grace.  

Ida Bell has been Gracie's nanny since the day she came home from the hospital in a shoebox.  They love each other like a real mother and daughter.  Even way more.  But the summer Grace turns ten, her white momma decides they need to move away.  

Moving means just one thing:  leaving Ida Bell.  Grace knows she cannot go.  She knows she cannot let go.  How can she leave the person who raised her when her real momma couldn’t?  How can she leave the person who taught her how to walk, and who took her to her first day of school when her real momma wouldn’t?  If she leaves, who will keep her secrets?  Who will hold her?  Who will love her?

She can’t leave.  She won’t.  There must be a way to stay.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780996135771
Publisher:	Green Writers Press
Publication date:	11/09/2015
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	7 - 12 Years

About the Author

Leslie Rivver grew up in the Deep Alabama South. She ventured up the east coast for college and graduate school, spent close to a decade teaching children on the Arctic shores of Alaska, and now lives on a wild and cold mountain in Vermont.

Editorial Reviews

“Leslie Rivver’sBlackberries and Creamis the deeply moving story of a special friendship between a wise and loving black woman named Ida Bell and a young white girl named Gracie from a prominent but troubled family.Set in a small town in Alabama in the 1960s, this powerful coming-of-age story for middle-grade children deals honestly and lovingly with issues ranging from the Civil Rights Movement to death, and family dysfunction to our purpose in the world.” —Howard Frank Mosher, author of Stranger in the Kingdom

Howard Frank Mosher

2019-12-19
In Rivver's debut historical YA novel, a white Southern girl with a distant, depressed mother grows closer to her family's African-American housekeeper/nanny.

As the story opens, it's June 1965, and 10-year-old Gracie Callaway often feels shut out by her mother, Sadie, a busy and dedicated social worker for the Monroe CountyWelfare Department. Seeing her clients' helpless poverty has worn Sadie down, and she often comes home frazzled, withdrawn, and easily annoyed by her four fairly well-behaved children.As Gracie puts it, "Momma stayed tangled up these days, and the quiet between us was beginning to get right loud." But Ida Bell, a motherly African-American woman who provides household help, gives Gracie loving attention, encouragement, and support: "My heart didn't ache quite so bad for Momma, what with Ida Bell right here and all," the little girl narrates. As Sadie becomes more critical and controlling, Gracie longs for guidance and turns to Bible verses. When her parents decide to leave Monroe County, Gracie conceives a plan to stay behind with Ida Bell, and in the process of executing it, she matures and gains a wider perspective. Rivver honestly and insightfully describes the effect on children when a parent is struggling. She ably brings out Gracie's hurt feelings, untinged with self-pity, while also managing to convey Sadie's strengths. The narration and dialogue add color with homespun, folksy diction, as when Gracie describes her brother Will: "His face was happy as a tick on a fat dog." However, the white child and black nanny at the story's center is something of a cliché, and the book's presentation pays little attention to the realities of Ida Bell's hard work and long hours, or of the racism that she faces in society. Overall, her character is underdeveloped; she's always cheerful, and she even tap-dances down the street "like the famous vaudeville tap dancer, Bojangles." Another problematic aspect is that a white girl seems more central to Ida Bell's life than her own children and grandchildren, who are barely mentioned.

A tale that effectively illuminates a child's growing sensibility but paints a problematic portrait of a nanny.

Kirkus Reviews

"Leslie Rivver’s Blackberries and Cream is the deeply moving story of a special friendship between a wise and loving black woman named Ida Bell and a young white girl named Gracie from a prominent but troubled family. Set in a small town in Alabama in the 1960s, this powerful coming-of-age story for middle-grade children deals honestly and lovingly with issues ranging from the Civil Rights Movement to death, and family dysfunction to our purpose in the world.” — Howard Frank Mosher, author of Stranger in the Kingdom

From the Publisher

"Leslie Rivver’s bildungsroman Blackberries and Cream features the story of 10-year-old Grace Callaway who is hard at work making sense of her world in 1965 Alabama. . . .This story of the bonds between mothers and daughters, blood and otherwise, and of loyalty and friendship is not to be missed. It is as sweet as the blackberries and cream that he characters enjoy and that lends its image to the title." —Darcie Abbene, Vermont Woman magazine

Vermont Woman magazine Darcie Abbene

“This is an endearing and charming first novel.” —Karen Hesse, Newbery Medal and MacArthur Award winner, author of Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse

“Brimming with wisdom and mischief, this tender, heartfelt celebration of an abiding friendship between a white girl and her black caregiver in 1960s Alabama reminds us that the love we experience in childhood has the power to sustain us through a lifetime of change.” –Irene Latham, author of Leaving Gee’s Bend

Irene Latham