Her account covers her life from her birth in 1950 to 1966, and there’s a strong focus on her struggles with her alcoholic, schizophrenic mother. After Child Services intervenes, Nikki bounces from an initial foster placement to a reluctant grandmother to another foster home (“Did we do something wrong?/ Is that why no one wants us?” she thinks). That foster home is actually a stable respite, but she eventually returns home to live with her mother and her new stepfather, who sexually assaults her. Along the way she’s separated from her adored older sister, threatened by gangs, and devastated by the death of her loving if inconsistent father, but she also finds kindness and support from friends and teachers.

Throughout, the voice of the storyteller rings clear; a theme of the narrative, in fact, is the creation of memoir when trauma means that memory is “scraps of knowing/ wedged between blank spaces”; life has meant so much forgetting as well as remembering. Yet the past is still searingly and emotively evoked, whether she’s talking about the underlying rage that led her to avoid bullies for fear of what she’d be provoked to do, or the value of a lifesaving friendship (“I believed in Jackie,/ and she believed in me./ Funny how far/ that can take you”). She also shines the spotlight on golden moments that buoy her amid her travails, such as meeting James Baldwin or just hearing a friend’s mother offer loving words of support at a moment when it’s needed.

Characterization is potent as well, whether it be herself in a teenaged moment (“nearly fifteen-going-on-/ you-couldn’t-tell-me-nothin’”), the mother who even sober has sympathy for strangers but indifference for her daughter, or the demanding Holocaust-survivor teacher who pushes Nikki to fulfill her true potential. None of them overshadow young Nikki, however, who is the most compelling character of all—furious and flinty, loving and longing, talented and curious. She is deservedly proud of her resilience while abhorring its necessity.

Comparisons will inevitably be made between Ordinary Hazardsand Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (BCCB 9/14), another verse memoir of a readerly young Black girl who became a writer, and indeed, both are superlative works that testify to the glory of words. However, young Nikki’s writing, like her name, is clearly an act of self-definition in a world miserly in its nurturing: she makes herself; she names herself; she writes herself. Grimes potently conveys the way reading and writing can become ways not just to express oneself but to construct oneself, to articulate one’s identity, to map one’s mental and emotional territory. Readerly readers will find young Nikki inspiring company and agree with her that “surviving is almost easy/ if you have a strategy/ and a copy of/ A Wrinkle in Time.” A concluding gallery of photographs brings key characters to vivid life. (Deborah Stevenson, Editor, Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, starred review)