Written with quiet intensity, this beautiful and spare novel examines what happens to Tessa's family after her fifteen-year-old brother is killed in a drunk-driving accident. Set adrift, Tessa is forced to find a way to keep going . . . even as her mother drifts further and further from her. Like Getting Near to Baby, this is an unstinting, compassionate, and deceptively plain story of a damaged family forging a way out of its grief.

When her older brother is killed in an accident, ten-year-old Tessa and her parents find it difficult to overcome their grief and return to living normally.

The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the “Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment” she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate the scorching impact of racism. Elliott separated students into two groups. She instructed the brown-eyed children to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. Without telling the children the experiment’s purpose, Elliott demonstrated how easy it was to create abhorrent racist behavior based on students’ eye color, not skin color. As a result, Elliott would go on to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, followed by a stormy White House conference, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and thousands of media events and diversity-training sessions worldwide, during which she employed the provocative experiment to induce racism. Was the experiment benign? Or was it a cruel, self-serving exercise in sadism? Did it work? Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a meticulously researched book that details for the first time Jane Elliott’s jagged rise to stardom. It is an unflinching assessment of the incendiary experiment forever associated with Elliott, even though she was not the first to try it out. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town’s children for more than a decade. The searing story is a cautionary tale that examines power and privilege in and out of the classroom. It also documents small-town White America’s reflex reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent meteoric rise of diversity training that flourishes today. All the while, Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes reveals the struggles that tormented a determined and righteous woman, today referred to as the “Mother of Diversity Training,” who was driven against all odds to succeed.

Jane Elliott is an educator who began her career in a third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa, and over the past fifty years has become an educator of people of all ages all over the U.S. and abroad.The Blue-eyed, Brown-eyed Exercise which she devised to help her students to understand Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work, has been cited and studied by psychologists and sociologists all over the world. Elliott lives in a remodeled schoolhouse twenty-one miles from where she was born. She remains stedfast in her belief that there is only one race, THE HUMAN RACE, of which we are all members.

When her older brother is killed in an accident, ten-year-old Tessa and her parents find it difficult to overcome their grief and return to living normally.

Spending the summer on an island off the coast of Maine, sixteen-year-old Evan grows closer to her grandmother and gains new maturity and self-confidence.

Celebrates the unique spirit of the blue-eyed girl or boy.