D Foster showed up a few months before Tupac got shot that first time and left us the summer before he died.

The day D Foster enters Neeka and her best friend's lives, the world opens up for them. D comes from a world vastly different from their safe Queens neighborhood, and through her, the girls see another side of life that includes loss, foster families and an amount of freedom that makes the girls envious. Although all of them are crazy about Tupac Shakur's rap music, D is the one who truly understands the place where he's coming from, and through knowing D, Tupac's lyrics become more personal for all of them.

The girls are thirteen when D's mom swoops in to reclaim Dand as magically as she appeared, she now disappears from their lives. Tupac is gone, too, after another shooting; this time fatal. As the narrator looks back, she sees lives suspended in time, and realizes that even all-too-brief connections can touch deeply.

"As she did in Feathers with the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Woodson here invokes the music of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, whose songs address the inequalities confronting many African-Americans. In 1994, the anonymous narrator is 11, and Tupac has been shot. Everyone in her safe Queens neighborhood is listening to his music and talking about him, even though the world he sings about seems remote to her. Meanwhile D, a foster child, meets the narrator and her best friend, Neeka, while roaming around the city by herself ('She's like from another planet. The Planet of the Free,' Neeka later remarks). They become close, calling themselves Three the Hard Way, and Tupac's music becomes a soundtrack for the two years they spend together. Early on, when Tupac sings, ''Brenda's Got a Baby,'' about a girl putting her baby in a trash can, D explains, ''He sings about the things that I'm living,'' and Neeka and the narrator become aware of all the ''stuff we ain't gonna know [about D],'' who never does tell them where she lives or who her mother is. The story ends in 1996 with Tupac's untimely death and the reappearance of D's mother, who takes D with her, out of roaming range. Woodson delicately unfolds issues about race and less obvious forms of oppression as the narrator becomes aware of them; occasionally, the plot feels manipulated toward that purpose. Even so, the subtlety and depth with which the author conveys the girls' relationships lend this novel exceptional vividness and staying power. Ages 12-up." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Those who think, as I do, that Jacqueline Woodson's books sometimes muss the fine line between poignant and sentimental — last year's 'Feathers' being an example — have a surprise in store for them with this slender, note-perfect novel. Two 11-year-old girls lead a happy but sheltered life in 1990s Queens, New York, reined in hard by their no-nonsense mamas yet dreaming all the while of the wider,... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) wilder world they glimpse in the music of their hero, the sad-eyed rapper Tupac Shakur. A few months before Pac is shot the first time, the window cracks open a bit more with the arrival of the enigmatic D ('Desiree? Your name's Desiree?'), a foster child and a 'roamer' and pretty soon their soul mate. 'I see Tupac rapping,' D says, 'and I see he got that same look that I got.' But in the summer of 1996, as the girls are turning 13, D's mama shows up to take her away. In September, Pac is shot again, this time fatally. In a flash, our two have lost both their icons of cool, and that glorious window has slammed shut. No matter. The sun still comes up 'all crazy orange and gold behind the houses,' and it dawns on the narrator, thinking back, just how far they have come toward finding their 'Big Purpose' — 'to figure ourselves on out.'

Elizabeth Ward can be reached at warde(at symbol)washpost.com."

Reviewed by Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

A lot can happen to three girls in a two-year period--especially when the rap music of Tupac Shakur is the glue holding them together.

Jacqueline Woodson's poignant writing rings true in the voice of her naivebut perceptivenarrator, who, like her friends, yearns to understand the world and find her Big Purpose in life.