Blue Beach

Gr 9 Up–An excellent coming-of-age story of a young Black girl who discovers the many different complex and nuanced ways that racism can exist without being overtly displayed. In 1929, Blue Collins’s parents own and operate Blue Beach, the only beach ­accessible to Black people in Santa Monica, CA. The Collinses, a light-skinned Black family, are aware that some of the white townspeople are racist, but Blue, 15, is more immediately concerned with her family’s disapproval of her dark-skinned friend, Ben. When Blue and Ben discover the dead body of a popular white girl on Blue Beach, they relocate it to a white beach in a moment of panic; unfortunately, this leaves Ben without an alibi when he is named chief suspect. As Blue tries to solve the murder to save Ben, she uncovers a larger conspiracy that threatens her family and their way of life. Although the mystery itself is rather straightforward, Parsons’s treatment of race and class brings the novel to a higher level. Characters are all initially described as either Black or white, but each is ultimately depicted as a unique and complex individual who cannot be so simply defined. For example, spoiled and privileged white teen Jack Curtiss secretly struggles to please his father. Meanwhile, the town drunkard, Rufus, is revealed to have once been a prominent Black businessman who’d considered Jack’s father a friend.