Selma and Zeke are two teenagers living in small town California. Feeling trapped by their community, the persistence of racism and responsibility to family define their imagined possibilities. Navigating friendship and loss, they consider who or what their way out is and what they may sacrifice with those choices. Our Small Faces explores how young people learn the limits of love, lead foolishly with heart, and often grow up too fast.
Our Small Faces is a lyrical, heartbreaking trip back to the moment childhood ends for all of us, when we leave our families and neighborhoods and begin to venture out in the wider world. For this group of children, when the protections of childhood dissolve, they discover that all along they’ve been living in a world of casual hatred, of cruelty, and loss, and longing. Jamie Moore’s writing is precise, evocative, poetic, and tantalizing—she leaves you longing for more, and yet deeply aware that what she has given you is perfectly enough.
– From Christina Lynch, author of The Italian Party.
“In the tradition of Sandra Cisneros and Jamaica Kincaid, Moore has written a poignant coming of age tale with sparse and elegant prose. A beautiful novella about the persistence of love in the face of unsettling violence and loss, Our Small Faces is an enchanting debut by a talented writer of the next generation.”
From Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
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