![]() ![]() Whereas Tracey's physical grace is confident and intuitive, the narrator is drawn to something more ephemeral: "a dancer was a man from nowhere, without parents or siblings, without a nation or people, without obligations of any kind, and this was exactly the quality I loved," she thinks. The girls both love dancing, but this commonality reflects their differences more than their similarities. As with Smith's previous work, the nuances of race relations are both subtle and explicit, not the focus of the book and yet informing every interaction. Although she lives in the same public housing as Tracey, she's being raised among books and protests by an intellectual black feminist mother and a demure white father. The other girl, the narrator of Smith's (NW) powerful and complex novel, remains unnamed. Tracey has a sassy white mum, a black father in prison, and a pink Barbie sports car. At a dance class offered in a local church in London in the early 1980s, two brown girls recognize themselves in one another and become friends. ![]()
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