About The Book
Based on the author’s real experience, this charming and hilarious picture book follows a solitary homeowner who insists she’s much too busy to adopt a stray cat…until the cat adopts her.
Staceypants lives in a beautiful yellow house in Charm City where she stays busy fixing things, planting pretty flowers, and keeping her home clean. One day, she finds a scruffy gray cat perched on her fence. But Staceypants definitely does not want a cat. Cats scratch furniture, jump on everything, and they need a litter box!
No, this is not Staceypants’s cat. Not when the cat comes back again and again. Not when Staceypants buys the cat a fancy cat bed. Not even when she and the cat sunbathe and do porch yoga together. But what will she do when the cat that’s not her cat disappears?
Staceypants lives in a beautiful yellow house in Charm City where she stays busy fixing things, planting pretty flowers, and keeping her home clean. One day, she finds a scruffy gray cat perched on her fence. But Staceypants definitely does not want a cat. Cats scratch furniture, jump on everything, and they need a litter box!
No, this is not Staceypants’s cat. Not when the cat comes back again and again. Not when Staceypants buys the cat a fancy cat bed. Not even when she and the cat sunbathe and do porch yoga together. But what will she do when the cat that’s not her cat disappears?
About The Book
A challenge to the cultural tradition of corporal punishment in Black homes and its connections to racial violence in America
About The Book
An astonishing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who survived the foster care system and went on to become an award-winning journalist.
On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey Patton, promising student at NYU, approached her adoptive parents’ house with a gun in her hand. She wanted to kill them. Or so she thought.
No one would ever imagine that the vibrant, smart, and attractive Stacey had a childhood from hell. After all, with God-fearing, house-proud, and hardworking adoptive parents, she appeared to beat the odds. But her mother was tyrannical, and her father turned a blind eye to the years of abuse his wife heaped on their love-starved little girl.
Now in her unforgettable memoir, Stacey links her experience to the legacy of American slavery and successfully frames her understanding of why her good adoptive parents did terrible things to her by realizing they had terrible things done to them. She describes a story of how a typical American family can be undermined by their own effort to be perfect on the surface while denying emotional wounds inflicted—even generations before—that were never allowed to heal.
Unflinching and powerfully written, That Mean Old Yesterday ultimately brings light and gives a voice to children who have experienced mistreatment at the hands of those who are meant to help.
On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey Patton, promising student at NYU, approached her adoptive parents’ house with a gun in her hand. She wanted to kill them. Or so she thought.
No one would ever imagine that the vibrant, smart, and attractive Stacey had a childhood from hell. After all, with God-fearing, house-proud, and hardworking adoptive parents, she appeared to beat the odds. But her mother was tyrannical, and her father turned a blind eye to the years of abuse his wife heaped on their love-starved little girl.
Now in her unforgettable memoir, Stacey links her experience to the legacy of American slavery and successfully frames her understanding of why her good adoptive parents did terrible things to her by realizing they had terrible things done to them. She describes a story of how a typical American family can be undermined by their own effort to be perfect on the surface while denying emotional wounds inflicted—even generations before—that were never allowed to heal.
Unflinching and powerfully written, That Mean Old Yesterday ultimately brings light and gives a voice to children who have experienced mistreatment at the hands of those who are meant to help.