Piecing Me Together Themes

Piecing Me Together follows high school student Jade throughout her junior year. Jade is an anomaly in her neighborhood, but the pride of it: rather than attend the neighborhood’s public high school, she buses to a private school called St. Francis, where she attends on a scholarship. At St. Francis, however, Jade is also an anomaly—she’s one of only a handful of black students, in addition to being poor and overweight. As Jade navigates her…

Jade, a high school student, loves language. She’s dedicated to learning Spanish and wants to go on her school’s yearly service learning trip to Costa Rica for the language experience, as well as for the opportunity to help others. Further, Jade characterizes language—and a foreign language like Spanish in particular—as something freeing: she believes that as a bilingual person, she’ll have many more opportunities at success later in life. However, as the novel progresses…

Friendship is a difficult subject for Jade: since starting at St. Francis, a private high school, two years ago, she hasn’t made any close friends at school. Though Jade isn’t bullied, she feels as though she’s incompatible with the majority of her classmates, and instead spends most of her free time with kids she grew up with, such as her best friend Lee Lee and Lee Lee’s cousins. This all begins to change when…