I think of legal segregation as something dreadful that happened a long, long time ago. That makes it hard for me, when I hear about racial discrimination, to take it all in. Growing up, I couldn’t even imagine being in a majority-white area, and indeed when I moved to Wisconsin as an adult, I was very uncomfortable with the all-white surroundings. I spent the second half of my childhood in west-side San Antonio, were 90% of my classmates were Hispanic. I spent the first half of my childhood in urban Columbia, SC, where 90% of my classmates were black. But I was born in 1979 and I never had to live through legal segregation. Like most people, I know about segregated schools, theatres, buses, etc. On a completely different note, The Untelling brought home just how close to my life legalized segregation was. In the real world, lies create a mess that can’t be easily cleaned up. But in the real world, a series of lies ends in pain, the breakup of relationships, and the end of trust. In children’s books, a series of progressive lies ends with the liar learning why he/she shouldn’t have lied. I knew, I could see, I could feel, exactly where this was going to go. When the first lie tumbled out of Aria’s lips, I wanted to scream “NO NO NO” at her. Lies – no matter how big or small – do nothing but make a situation worse. There are many different themes that ride through this book, but the one that touched me the most was the importance of honesty. Often when I read books that deal with this sort of neighborhood, I find them unbelievable, forced, or inaccurate.

It was so genuine, and that sort of voice is, in my experience, very difficult to capture. I understood the girls she was teaching, even though their experiences were not my own. Having myself grown up in a world where drugs, violence, robbery, teen pregnancy, and school dropouts were the norm, I could really relate to Aria and the people around her. Jones handles both subjects with more tact that I’m used to, and as I got past my fears, I was drawn into Aria’s world.

Drugs and vomiting…two of my phobias all wrapped up together in the same book. I didn’t know much about it going in, and I wasn’t sure how much I’d like reading a book that has morning sickness and a neighborhood full of crackheads. But then a revelation changes everything.

She’s pregnant and her boyfriend has proposed. Everything seems to be headed that direction. She wants nothing more than to marry and have a family. Now, as an adult, Aria lives in a drug-infested neighborhood in Atlanta, working in an outreach program for teen literacy. The rest of her adolescence was spent with an older sister who just wanted to get away and a disapproving mother who became progressively crazier as time passed. When Aria was a child, her family was ripped apart by a car accident that killed her father and baby sister.

The untelling