Set during the post-civil rights movement, Roberta Frost still has many questions about how she fits into the world. She’s thirteen, Black, and Catholic at a pivotal moment in history. She’s arguing with the nuns at her school about the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson and dealing with her parents’ troubled marriage at home. Then, when she’s told she can’t participate in her school’s essay contest, her mother reveals family truths she’ll have to face head-on.
Roberta Frost, a bright but rebellious Black Philadelphia thirteen-year-old, copes with life’s difficulties and her parent’s struggling marriage through her poetry, writing, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Set during the height of the Watergate scandal, Roberta spirals into doubt about her religion and the adults in her life after a nun at her school makes a racist remark. When disappointment with her ineligibility in her school’s essay contest puts Roberta into an enraged confrontation with her mother, familial truths are revealed.
Where do I even start with Malcolm and Me? This book blew my mind in the best way possible. It’s 1973, and 13-year-old Roberta has a lot of feelings. She’s reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and discussing Black history and Black Power with her father at home, and clashing with a racist nun at her Philadelphia Catholic school. When she’s sent home after a blowup with Sister Elizabeth, she deep dives into the Autobiography, examining her own feelings and frustrations through Malcolm X’s lenses. Already a writer, she begins journaling her verse and diary entries, guided by Malcolm, and it gives her the strength she needs as her home life and school life begin unraveling.
Living in an age where movements like #OwnVoices mean increasing representation for BIPOC stories, Malcolm and Me is a historical fiction story that I would have appreciated as a young reader who rarely saw Black history on the shelves of my local library.
In Robin Farmer’s debut novel, we encounter Roberta, an eighth-grader in Philadelphia who finds herself revolutionized by The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The target of her revolt? A combative and racist nun who just so happens to be Roberta’s homeroom teacher, and Roberta’s mother who can’t quite seem to understand Roberta. Through the course of the story we see the ways in which watching her parents’ marriage fail moves Roberta to take out her emotions on others in destructive and self-righteous ways. As one of the few Black students at the private Catholic school that her parents sacrificed to get her admitted into, Roberta is greatly aware of how her high academic standing provides her access to classes that she rarely sees other Black students in, while also feeling trapped by this particular dynamic. As she learns more about Malcolm X, she draws more connections between the unfairness that she experiences — from no longer spending as much time as she is used to with her father because of her parents’ separation, to being kept out of the school’s writing contest that she longs to enter due to the after effects of her altercation with the racist Sister.
The author does a great job with the struggles in this story. I thought that it felt real and honest and I hope to find another story by Farmer soon. I know that I fell for Roberta as soon as I started reading. She had courage that makes this one debut that you can’t put down.
I can’t recommend Malcolm and Me: A Novel by Robin Farmer more. As a reader, I’ve personally been looking for books that deal with racial prejudice, especially from a teenaged perspective, and this book does exactly that. “Young, gifted, black and Catholic,” Roberta Forest is (almost) all those things. The novel centers around Roberta’s grasp on life and specifically, her relationship with Catholicism and race. Set against the backdrop of Philadelphia in the 1970s, she questions her religion after her nun at school flings a racist insult at her. From that point on, Roberta begins to question everything else she thought she knew.
