Last Summer on State Street

 by Toya Wolfe, 2022, 212 pages, hardback, e-book, audiobook.

In this moving autobiographical novel, Toya Wolfe tells the story of 12-year-old Fe Fe (Felicia) and her friends Precious, Stacia, and Tonya during the summer of 1999. The Chicago Housing Authority is tearing down  the Robert Taylor Homes, the enormous public housing project where she lives with her mother and her older brother Meechie. Everyone will have to find a new place to live.

At the beginning of the novel, Fe Fe and her friends are still able to be children, double-dutching  (jumping rope) and spending time together. As destruction of their building approaches, tensions, and violence rise. It becomes impossible to ignore the poverty, drugs, police brutality, and gang warfare. Fe Fe must deal with  harsh realities around her--Meechie's unsuccessful struggle to resist gang life, Stacia's gang loyalty, and Tonya's mother's crack addiction. This is the story of how the children who live in these housing projects are forced to become adults too soon. As Fe Fe puts it, “Black kids don’t get the luxury of appearing childlike and innocent, that from the moment we are born, some people start a clock on how long it’ll take the boys to commit a crime, the girls to seduce.”

While Wolfe, who grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes, depicts the sadness of the characters’ lives, she also shows the power of love, faith, and close relationships to help some of them escape their grim world and build better lives.