Ruth Perkinson

This novel is about a thirteen year-old orphan named Piper who lives with her neglectful alcoholic grandfather. The only bright spot in her life is her loving mutt, Someday. Luckily we are told up front that this is not one of those books where the dogs dies, otherwise the story might be too depressing! Piper's life changes when a caring lesbian couple moves into the neighborhood and begins taking an interest in her.

I really like lesbian fiction and I'm usually not very picky about this genre. I thought that the plot, pacing, and writing in Piper's Someday were fine in general, but there were a couple things that soured the book for me so that I'm afraid I didn't really enjoy this novel so much. This book wasn't really for me. The first section of the book had a lot of epithets such as "r#tarded" and the n word. I know that this was intended to show the bigoted environment that Piper was growing up in, but every time I read these words it felt like a punch in the stomach. Although the novel is about a 13 year old girl, and has a storyline like that of a YA book, this book doesn't use any of the tricks that YA or middle grade books use to convey hate speech, unreliable narrators, etc without being offensive.

Then there was an African-American character named Shaneefa who was described like this: "She was big and black as night. Her lips were thick and her nose was flat and her eyelashes were humongous." Shaneefa talks in patois right out of Mark Twain ("Das where de dogs go 'fo dey go to the big hou upstairs") which I don't think is an acceptable way to render dialect in the 21st century. I think the writer meant to show Piper's innocent, uncritical eyes. However, this perhaps-unintended racial caricature makes me extend an invitation to the author to examine unconscious bias. The editor should not have been asleep at the wheel here either.… (més)