Kenyatta Bernice, better known to her friends and family as KB, is a little Black girl living in Detroit with her family in the 1990s. She is about to turn 11 when her father dies from a drug overdose and her withering mother takes KB and her teenage sister Nia to stay with their estranged grandfather in Lansing, Michigan over the summer while she sorts out the aftermath of their father's death and the consequent loss of their home. KB just wants to be with her family, waking up each day to her Mama's ice cream cone smile, her father's delicious cooking, and playtime with her beautiful, cool older sister. She doesn't know where Mama has gone or when she is coming back for her and Nia. Instead she is relegated to the foreignness of staying with her Granddad, climbing in her tree, and trying to befriend the white kids across the street, much to the chagrin of their mother, who already has her own distasteful ideas of "what kind of person someone like" KB is.

Over the course of one summer that changes everything for and about KB, we follow her as she experiences deep loneliness, angst, revelations, loss, but above all: hope, love, and the strength of family. This is a coming-of-age story that beautifully captures Black girlhood, and pairs the pain of the loss of innocence that KB endures with the love she feels for the family she already knew and the family she gains over her Lansing summer. Not only does this book so succinctly capture that significant pre-teen moment between the innocence of early childhood and the turbulent emotions of adolescence, but Kai Harris magnificently layers in poignant themes of family, race, mental health, drug use, and class for a knock-out debut that you should be sure not to miss!

I cried like a baby during parts of this book! Honestly, I haven't cried that much while reading in a long time. Kai Harris does such an excellent job of writing in the voice of a girl teetering on the fence between childhood and teenage years, and it is both entirely absorbing and absolutely heartbreaking throughout the novel. KB's magical world of childhood is crumbling around her. The realities of what her life will be like as a result of her background, her skin color, her family makeup shatter the innocence she starts out with in the beginning of the novel. And yet, although this book has so much sadness, it also has so much levity in the moments where KB is still able to be a child. There is a lot of hope in the way the three women/women-to-be lose each other in their grieving processes and find each other once again in the end. The family relationships explored in What the Fireflies Knew were at once agonizing, tender and affirming. I was rooting for this pair of sisters even when Nia was a snob or when KB was a brat. The way they found each other again, though sprung from horrible things that happened to each of them, was beautiful and left me believing in the whole family's opportunity for redemption by the end of the book. The sisterhood relationship in this novel stood out to me above any of the other relationships. I don't have a sister, but I imagine this is exactly what it feels like.

Every character in this book serves as an example of redemption—and what happens when it isn't afforded to you. I appreciate the humanity that Harris gave to the missing father figure in this story. As a child who lost a parent to addiction, I think it's so vitally important, especially now in the midst of the opioid epidemic, to characterize those struggling with addiction as still worth loving and still capable of loving others, so I really appreciated that in this book. I was the same age as KB when my mother died of an overdose, so I connected deeply to her character and the grieving process she is going through. No character in this story was a caricature (save Bobby and Charlotte's mother, but she's an all-too-believable caricature of a casual racist in the 1990s) and despite the deep flaws of every member of KB's family, they are all worthy of love and the redemption that they do eventually get by the end. I had an extra soft spot for KB and Nia's Granddad and really appreciated KB's relationship with him in particular.

I just loved this book. It's hard to sit here and list critiques though I can think of a few. The fact is, they fall to the wayside because of the important and beautiful story that emerges from KB's internal struggles. Zenzi Williams lent her voice to the audio and it was brilliantly narrated. You feel so much for this little girl when you hear her story. This is one I will be adding to my personal collection and coming back to more than once for its lovely portrayal of a young girl coming to grips with both the harshness and the light in this world.