Goodreads asked Lisa Moore Ramée:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Lisa Moore Ramée I've always wanted to write a book about how race starts factoring into children's lives right around the time they hit junior high/middle school. (At least that's when it became an issue for me.) When my daughter started junior high, it became an issue for her too and I realized things hadn't changed much. Lunch areas were still breaking down by color lines. And then with all the highly publicized police killings of black citizens and the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, I knew a young black girl would be strongly impacted by these things. All this came together for Shayla's story.

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