Blended by Sharon M. Draper is about an eleven year old girl named Isabella with a white mom and black dad. Being a mixed kid in modern society, people always come up to her and ask, where are you from? What are you really? or say, you look so exotic!
To add to the pile, Isabella’s parents are divorced. She has to move in with her mom one week and stay with her dad the other. All of this causes Isabella to question her identity. She’s half white and half Black, but she feels more like a bottle of nail polish that is switched between two friends each week. Is she white? Is she Black? Or is she both? And how will she get people to see her as a whole, human person?
This book covers familial conflict, modern racism, and identity crisis. People of color face racism in Isabella’s town daily. But no one notices until something disastrous happens — a noose is found hanging from the locker of a black girl. From then on, it becomes serious — and many people take it personally, including Isabella. She learns not only a lot about herself, but about racial violence and how bad it can get. This is one of my favorite parts of the book; I love how the author wasn’t afraid to show how violent hatred against black people (and racism in general) got and what a noose really means as a sign of hatred.
The author also emphasizes Isabella’s anxiety when she hears her parents fight and heartache over her parents divorce. And when her dad moves back to Ohio, Isabella has to be swapped between her mom and her dad, who actually seem to get along worse and worse as time passes.
Isabella describes herself as a caramel daughter caught helplessly between her “chocolate” family and “vanilla” family, which basically is a metaphor about the color of her skin, implying that she is a combination of her Black dad and white mom. Every time her parents swap, she feels less than human. This leads to her identity crisis (and thus the main plot of the book) about her race and who she really is in general. Draper was really good at portraying how divorce shapes young kids like Isabella, and it gave a fresh perspective on how she was feeling.
Isabella, with the help of friends and family, eventually finds herself in the book and I think it’s really inspiring towards children in middle school today, whether they are children of divorce or not. Draper also gives the cold, hard truth when it comes to racism, family, and life in general. I feel like I learned a lot from this book. It has relatable characters, a realistic plot, and you will be left turning the pages in excitement. I’d personally recommend this book for 10+, it has a few violent scenes, but other than that, this is a great book and I hope you read it! Goodnight!
