BORN BLUE by Han Nolan is a moving story of little girl who loses everything but finds that her most precious gifts are inside. When her world keeps falling apart, her voice and her passion keep her strong enough to survive anything.

As the child of a heroin addict, Janie's first memory is of "drowning" as a little girl while spending time with her birth mother Linda. Soon after, four-year-old Janie is placed in a foster home where she meets seven-year-old Harmon Finch. Despite their racial and age differences (their foster mother refers to the two of them as Vanilla and Chocolate), they form the strongest bond that Janie has ever known. She has no family to speak of and immediately sees Harmon as the brother she never had, her second soul. Harmon introduces Janie to his shoe box full of the "ladies" (45s of Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Roberta Flack), and Janie feels like she has come home: she loves listening to them and discovers how much she loves to sing. When she sings, she feels complete, whole.

Over the next couple of years, Janie suffers some big losses: Harmon is adopted by a family, her foster caseworker Doris stops working, and she is kidnapped by Linda! During all of this, Janie longs to be someone else, someone new, someone black. So she adopts the name Leshaya as her own.

Despite being moved around to different foster families, having an unplanned pregnancy, and feeling cheated by what life has given her, Leshaya holds tightly to her dream of one day singing like the "ladies." After traveling around the South and singing with many different bands, she eventually joins a band that gets radio play for one of their songs. But that doesn't mean life gets any easier for Leshaya. There are more twists and turns to the story of her struggle to find a better life, but she never gives up.

BORN BLUE is heartbreaking and honest and, like Leshaya, it is a diamond in the rough.

   --- Reviewed by Megan Kalan


(c) Copyright 2003, Teenreads.com. All rights reserved.