The Means That Make Us Strangers

"Powerful" -BookLife
"Entertaining and engaging" -Reviews from the Stacks
"Extraordinary and original" -Children's Bookwatch

Winner of the Christy Award for Young Adult

Home is where your people are. But who are your people?

Adelaide has lived her whole life in rural Ethiopia as the white American daughter of an anthropologist. Then her family moves to South Carolina, in 1964.

Adelaide vows to find her way back to Ethiopia, marry Maicaah, and become part of the village for real. But until she turns eighteen, Adelaide must adjust to this strange, white place that everyone tells her is home. Then Adelaide becomes friends with the five African-American students who sued for admission into the white high school. Even as she navigates her family's expectations and her mother's depression, Adelaide starts to enjoy her new friendships, the chance to learn new things, and the time she spends with a blond football player. Life in Greenville becomes interesting, and home becomes a much more complex equation.

Adelaide must finally choose where she belongs: the Ethiopian village where she grew up, to which she promised to return? Or this place where she's become part of something bigger than herself?

"Teen readers interested in the civil rights era will be enthralled by this nuanced story of race relations in the 1960s American South, seen through the eyes of a white girl raised in Ethiopia."-BookLife

"Christine Kindberg's fiction explores the complexity of identity, love, and faith with extraordinary intimacy and skill. Her bracing prose draws you into the lives of characters who live and breathe upon the page." -Naeem Murr, author of The Perfect Man (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize)

"The Means That Make Us Strangers is a beautifully written coming-of-age story that will satisfy experienced readers as well as younger ones. Christine Kindberg treats all of these characters graciously and with deep generosity. The result is a gorgeous meditation on growing up, experiencing love, and finding home." -Pinckney Benedict, three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, author of Dogs of God and Miracle Boy and Other Stories

From CHAPTER 1:
A tangle of arms reaching toward the fig tree. Among the thicket of deep-black arms stretching toward the fruit, two arms stood out, pale as a full moon.
I remember thinking how different those arms looked, while waiting for fruit to drop as Maicaah shook the branch. A fig hit the white hands and fell to the ground, and it was with shock that I felt the pain in my hands.
The others scrambled to get the figs that had landed in the grass. I stayed standing, turning my hands over and over in the sunlight that filtered through the leaves.
When Kinci stood up, I pulled her wrist until her arm was elbow-to-elbow with mine. Our arms were the same length, and we both had beaded cuffs of yellow, purple, green, and red beads in the same zig-zag pattern. Underneath and around her bracelet, the skin of her arm was as dark as a burnt clay pot, with pink scar spots where she'd scratched at bug bites. My arm was the color of dried grass, even paler in the crease of my elbow, against the contrast of the dirt that gathered there.
"I'm white," I said.