Pemba's Song: A Ghost Story

Pemba knows she's not crazy. But who is that looking out at her through her mirror's eye? And why is the apparition calling her "friend"? Her real friends are back home in Brooklyn, not in the old colonial house in Colchester, Connecticut, where none of this would have happened if Daddy were still alive. But now all Pemba has is Mom and that strange old man, Abraham. Maybe he's the crazy one.

Thank goodness for Pemba's Playlist and the journal she keeps. There are so many answers deep inside that music. So much is revealed in Pemba's poetry -- the bops she writes and those coming through her iPod. Phyllis, an 18th-century slave girl, has answers too. But Phyllis's reality billows out from her visits to Pemba, visits that transform both girls in ways neither expected.

In this supernatural tale, the voices of these two characters entwine to put a new spin on a paranormal story. As a mystery unfolds, many truths are revealed -- about honesty, freedom, redemption, and friendship.

Excerpt:

Miles of highway and nothin

but trees. Mom's movin me to Nowhere,

CT when I used to live in the center of the universe:

Brooklyn, NY. This must be some kind of evil curse. . . .

I'm journalin like my hand's on fire, ear buds blarin:

~Pemba

The truth everywhere evident:

my days are numbered in our happy home.

The only home I know.

Both in here and out there, I am invisible. . .

~Phyllis

Children's Literature

In this slim book, Nelson and Hegamin join forces to depict the powerful encounter between two girls separated by over two centuries. Pemba is a moody, disaffected, modern-day teen, forced by her widowed mother to move away from her lively life in Brooklyn to a centuries-old, long-abandoned house in a small town in Connecticut. Phyllys is a slave girl who once lived in the house, witness to a terrible and never prosecuted crime. What the two girls have in common is that they express their deepest and otherwise inexpressible feelings through poetry—and that each needs the other desperately. Pemba's first-person narration, written by Hegamin, makes up most of the book; three-time National Book Award finalist Nelson generates the subtle, slant-rhymed sonnets of Phyllys. The novel makes historical research seem urgent and riveting, as Pemba searches for answers to explain her communications with Phyllys by digging through the library archives of Colchester, Connecticut, together with its historian, Abraham (the real-life history buff who inspired these two authors to come together to write this book). And the novel makes poetry seem, not the stuff of an English class assignment, but the eloquent voice of real girls who communicate with each other across the divide of centuries. This is a highly original and striking collaboration. Reviewer: Claudia Mills, Ph.D.

Tonya C. Hegamin is the author of MOST LOVED IN ALL THE WORLD and M+O 4EVR, both forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Company. She received a B.A. in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from The New School University. Tonya has worked as a social worker and teacher for teens in crises and has also taught poetry workshops to at-risk and incarcerated women. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.