?Mishna Wolff was a white girl who grew up in a poor black neighborhood. This funny, engaging, and perceptive memoir tells the story of how she managed to negotiate these two very different worlds, and emerge with her sanity?and identity?intact.??Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher

?And you thought you had a hard time fitting in when you were growing up? Try on Mishna Wolff's bizarre childhood for size . . . I?m Down explodes racial and cultural stereotypes with self-deprecating wit, wry humor and keen observation.??Janelle Brown, author of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

?In a parallel universe?one, say, where Richard Pryor could be merged with Mark Twain and re-born with two x-chromosomes?the result would probably be Mishna Wolff. And her memoir, I have no doubt, would be as beautiful, funny, touching and irresistible as�I'm Down.??Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight and Pain Killers

?Hilarious and sometimes tragic, Mishna Wolff's book is the expertly woven tale of a girl caught between two lives, two races, and two classes.??Christian Lander, author of Stuff White People Like

?A really, really funny book about the slings and arrows of growing up, of being a kid, of figuring out where you belong, of figuring IT out. The royal IT. Mishna's writing is fast, hip, edgy and so funny.??Michael Showalter, comedian and actor

?Hilarious, bittersweet, and full of soul (in every sense of the word).??Wendy McClure, author of I?m Not The New Me

?In a memoir that is frequently hilarious, occasionally terrifying, and ultimately bittersweet, Wolff forces readers to consider whether racial identity is the result of nature, derived through nurture, or constructed and reconstructed throughout life. The author was born to white parents and raised into early adolescence mostly by her father, a man who worked harder to remake his own and his children's identities as black than he did at earning a living. From early childhood she tried hard to sort through evidence of her own sense of self and belonging: rougher kids in their working-class black Seattle neighborhood rejected her while adoring her younger (equally white) sister; other black kids accepted her as an equal or pitied her confusion; her father's second wife (black) rejected her cruelly; and her mother was willing to take her in but not to confront her former husband's careless child-rearing. When her mother enrolled her in a public school program for intellectually gifted children, Wolff had to accommodate her worldview to take into account her classmates? relative wealth and mindless racism. Father and daughter eventually found a bridge through sports, but this rapprochement was made possible as much by the author's maturing emotional health as by her father's realization that he risked losing her. Wolff writes fluidly and offers moments of great insight through story rather than through explanation, making it easy for readers to engage with the child's questions and growing frustrations. An excellent choice for discussion in ethnic identity curricula, but absorbing reading, too.??Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia, Library Journal