WHAT THE FIREFLIES KNEW

In the vein of Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones and Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of eleven-year-old KB, as she and her sister try, over the course of a summer, to make sense of their new life with their estranged grandfather after the death of their father and disappearance of their mother

After her father dies of an overdose and the debts incurred from his addiction cause the loss of the family home in Detroit, almost-eleven-year-old Kenyatta Bernice (KB) and her teenage sister Nia are sent by their overwhelmed mother to live with their estranged grandfather in Lansing. What The Fireflies Knew spans a single, sweltering summer as KB attempts to get her bearings in a world that has turned upside down––a father who is labeled a fiend; a mother whose smile no longer reaches her eyes; a sister, once her best friend, who has crossed the threshold of adolescence and suddenly want nothing to do with her; a grandfather who is grumpy and silent; the white kids across the street who are friendly, but only sometimes. And all of them are keeping secrets. Pinballing between resentment, abandonment and loneliness, KB is forced to carve out a different identity for herself and find her own voice.

As she examines the jagged pieces of her recently shattered world, she learns that while some truths cut deep, a new life––and a new KB––can be built from the shards. Capturing all the vulnerability, perceptiveness, and inquisitiveness of a young girl on the cusp of puberty, Kai Harris's prose perfectly inhabits that hazy space between childhood and adolescence, where everything that was once familiar develops a veneer of strangeness when seen through newer, older eyes. Through KB's disillusionment and subsequent discovery of her own power, What The Fireflies Knew poignantly reveals that heartbreaking but necessary component of growing up––the realization that loved ones can be flawed, sometimes significantly so, and that the perfect family we all dream of looks different up close.

Kai Harris is currently pursuing a PhD in Fiction at Western Michigan University, where she is also Editor-in-Chief of Third Coast magazine. An excerpt from her upcoming novel was recently published in the Black Girlhood issue of Kweli Journal. She's also had work published in Flash Fiction Magazine and Rabble Lit. Kai is a contributing writer at The Everygirl, and a proud VONA/Voices alumna. She recently won the Gwen Frostic Creative Writing Award in Fiction at her university for the short story, “While We Live.” Originally from Detroit, Kai now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.