Salmon Croquettes - Paperback

by Glodean Champion (Author)

In 1965 Watts, Los Angeles, twelve year old Zayla Lucille McKinney lives in The Circle, a close knit Black community where everybody knows everybody and front porch gossip travels faster than the speed of light. She has a father who loves her loudly enough to fill any room, a mother who manages her image like a liability, and a best friend who has always known her better than she knows herself. What Zayla does not have is a word for who she is.

When her first kiss behind the school auditorium sets off a chain of consequences she never saw coming, Zayla is forced to bury the truest part of herself in order to survive her mother's wrath, her classmates' cruelty, and a community about to ignite. Because the summer of 1965 does not belong only to Zayla. It belongs to Watts. And when Marquette Frye is pulled over by the CHP and the neighborhood catches fire, everything Zayla thought she knew about her community, her family, and herself will be tested in ways she could never have imagined.

Tender, funny, heartbreaking, and fiercely alive, Salmon Croquettes is a love letter to Black girlhood, community, and the radical act of knowing who you are even when the world refuses to make space for it.