So I definitely needed to get that into this book.'īut the narrator, Fe Fe quickly realizes something isn't right with her friends, Stacia and Tonya. 'There was danger, but you also carried on and you found a way to find joy. 'I remember growing up, like you lived with that duality,' she says. The author emphasizes she wanted to include the lives of families, of kids just being kids. And tells the often-forgotten stories of Black girlhood. While the anxiety of not knowing when they will have to move from their homes. Throughout Last Summer on State Street, we follow twelve year old, Fe Fe and her friends, Precious, Stacia and Tonya as they navigate coming of age in the buildings. And if I was going to write a story about girlhood, that's the neighborhood, the block, I know best,'says Wolfe. Wolfe's Last Summer on State Street is intentional to include both moments of joy of playing Double Dutch to the quick reality of dodging bullets. The book focuses on the lives of four young Black girls as they come of age while watching the buildings around their home get knocked down. Toya Wolfe’s debut novel, Last Summer on State Street, is set in the Robert Taylor Homes. The bulldozing of the buildings left many displaced and scattered across the South Side of Chicago. The Robert Taylor Homes was a public housing project in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood that housed 27,000 people at its peak. It has been almost fifteen years since the last building of the Robert Taylor Homes was demolished.

Last summer on state street