When 17-year-old Hazel Newlevant takes a summer jobclearing ivy from the forest in her home town of Portland, Oregon, her onlyexpectation is to earn a little money. Homeschooled, affluent, and sheltered,Hazel soon finds her job working side by side with at-risk teens to be aninitiation into a new world that she has no skill in navigating. Thisuncomfortable and compelling memoir is an important story of a girl's awakeningto the racial insularity of her life, the power of white privilege, and thehidden story of segregation in Portland.
