From Los Angeles Times Book Prize Award winner and Edgar Award nominee Malla Nunn comes a stunning portrait of a family divided and a powerful story of how friendship saves and heals. Now in paperback.

Fifteen-year-old Amandla's mother has always been strange. For starters, she's a white woman living in Sugar Town, one of South Africa's infamous shanty towns. She won't tell anyone, not even Amandla, about her past. And she has visions, including ones that promise the return of Amandla's father-as if he were a prince in a fairy tale. But their difficult (even in the best of times) life in Sugar Town is no fairy tale and Amandla knows the truth-her father is long gone. He's just another mystery and missing piece of her mother's past and one of the many reasons people in Sugar Town give them strange looks-that and the fact that Amandla is Black and her mother is not.

Lately her mother has been acting even more strangely, so when Amandla finds a mysterious address at the bottom of her mother's purse along with a large amount of cash, she decides it's finally time to get answers. As she confronts devastating family secrets and even the devil himself, she'll need her best friends at her side, her fellow Sugar Town Queens, if she hopes to help heal a pain that has lasted a generation.