Sister Mischief (review)

The four teenagers who make up the suburban Minnesota all-girl hip-hop group Sister Mischief might not seem to have much in common. Esme, our narrator, is lesbian, Jewish, and riddled with abandonment issues from her mother’s long-ago departure; Marcy, her lifelong friend and fellow motherless misfit, is Catholic, straight but the epitome of a teenage tomboy; loyal teen-queen Tess is the only one of the group who fits into the town’s SWASP (straight white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) majority; and Rowie, short for Rohini, is brilliant, Hindu, and the embodiment of the phrase “still waters run deep.” When their school introduces a policy to ban all hip-hop music and attire from school property, the girls fight back by founding a school group dedicated to studying hip-hop as an art form. Additionally, a secret love affair blossoms between Esme and the deeply closeted, questioning Rowie. Footnotes incorporate a background babble of text messages, Facebook updates, and lyric snippets scribbled in notebooks, playing with the omnipresence and multi-threadedness of text culture in modern teen life; the group’s lyrics are provocative and smart while still believably teen-written. The book is distinguished by its ambitious engagement with issues of race, both in the complexities of white girls appropriating hip-hop as their mode of self-expression, and in its exploration of the racial, religious, and socioeconomic divisions that fragment the town and the school. The image of a white, middle-class midwesterner laying down rhymes like “She ain’t no prima donna, Michelle Robinson Obama/ An educated mama who’s a mama role model” brings up a wealth of issues, but Goode lays them right out on the table, allows her characters to put forth their own arguments for and against their right to use the music and language that speaks to them, and leaves it to readers to decide whether they agree or not. An odd yet appealing combination of programmatic and subversive, this eminently discussable debut novel captures the vibrancy and messiness of teen life.