Intersectionality, Identity, and Discrimination
Piecing Me Together follows high school student Jade throughout her junior year. Jade is an anomaly in her neighborhood, but the pride of it: rather than attend the neighborhood’s public high school, she buses to a private school called St. Francis, where she attends on a scholarship. At St. Francis, however, Jade is also an anomaly—she’s one of only a handful of black students, in addition to being poor and overweight. As Jade navigates her…
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The Power of Language
Jade, a high school student, loves language. She’s dedicated to learning Spanish and wants to go on her school’s yearly service learning trip to Costa Rica for the language experience, as well as for the opportunity to help others. Further, Jade characterizes language—and a foreign language like Spanish in particular—as something freeing: she believes that as a bilingual person, she’ll have many more opportunities at success later in life. However, as the novel progresses…
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Mentorship, Opportunity, and Dignity
Because Jade is a poor young black woman who’s extremely focused on doing well in school, she is the recipient of many opportunities meant to help her succeed or expose her to things she wouldn’t otherwise get the chance to experience. While Jade fully understands how important and beneficial these opportunities are, she also resents them. She tells the reader that, “girls like [her], with coal skin and hula-hoop hips, whose mommas barely make enough…
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Friendship
Friendship is a difficult subject for Jade: since starting at St. Francis, a private high school, two years ago, she hasn’t made any close friends at school. Though Jade isn’t bullied, she feels as though she’s incompatible with the majority of her classmates, and instead spends most of her free time with kids she grew up with, such as her best friend Lee Lee and Lee Lee’s cousins. This all begins to change when…
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