The Black Kids (Paperback)

While the cops who beat Rodney King are on trial - a trial that "is a battle for the very soul of the city, or even country itself" - Ashley Bennett lounges poolside with her clique of rich, white friends. The trial might as well be in another universe for all it matters to Ashley - at least for now. She's a senior in high school worried about Prom and getting into Stanford, having spent her life in the privileged bubble her workaholic parents created, moulding herself around their philosophy that because she is black she has to be better. Her pain-in-the-ass older sister, Jo, is the rebel; the angry one; the protester; the one who doesn't want to have to be better; the one who has dropped out of college and shacked up with a poor construction worker.

But when the cops are acquitted, the city is convulsed by riots, which slowly close in on Ashley and her family. And gradually the wall the Bennett's have built around their life, around the difficult realities most black people face, around their scarred racial history, starts to crumble...