Marlene hates having to spend the entire day at the Salon with her mom. Having her curly hair straightened hurts and she misses being able to play outside all day. But her family is very focused on having "good" hair, which always means straightened tidy hair. When Marlene decides to try to manage her hair on her own, things get complicated.

This is a really important book for young people of color, to see that those messages about supposedly good hair are rooted in white supremacy and anti-blackness. It was also a window (windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors analogy) for me to understand that better. I didn't really know (also didn't HAVE to know about it because of my white priviledge) how much went into black hair styling and just how much it was built on racism.

I am very grateful to authors like Claribel and illustrators like Rose for creating these stories and sharing them. This was such an easily approachable story that made these complicated concepts easier to understand and I hope lots of younger white readers will get to read it to better understand their black friends and friends of color. Not to mention that I hope it can help kids of color to feel better about their natural hair and maybe have conversations with others about it.