Pemba’s Song by Tonya Cherie Hegamin
Pemba’s Song by Tonya Cherie Hegamin, graduate, the MFA in Creative Writing at the School of Writing
Scholastic, 2008
Scholastic: Pemba knows she’s not crazy. But who is that looking out at her through her mirror’s eye? And why is the apparition call 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. And so much is revealed in Pemba’s poetry — the hopes she writes and those coming through her iPod. Phyllys, an eighteenth-century slave girl, has answers, too. They billow out from her ghostly 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 of friendship.