CELESTE’S HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Celeste’s father has tuberculosis and must go into a sanatorium. Her aunt can’t take care of her alone, so she must go to another aunt, an entertainer who lives in Harlem. As she travels from the South, she begins a coming-of-age journey that encompasses physical and emotional maturity, as well as a greater understanding of the people who touch her life—in essence, her own Harlem Renaissance. In 1920s Harlem, she encounters poets, musicians, philosophers and ordinary people struggling to survive and thrive in a society that is not as overtly racist as in the South, but has its own limitations placed on people of color. Tate has an eye, and an ear, for the ambience of the era as it is reflected in both the strictly segregated South and the new ideas emanating from Harlem. Celeste and her friends and family are well-conceived individuals, both real and imagined, and represent the wide variety of characters and personalities of African-American society without reverting to stereotypes. Absorbing. (Fiction. 10-12)