Flyy girl

Tracy Ellison is a middle-class teenager in Philadelphia in the 1980s, a decade of flashy money and louder fashion. Her relatives spoil her, and her mother cannot keep up with her. Tracy sets her sights on the most popular boys in her neighborhood and goes after them with more nerve than any of her girlfriends.

She wins them over with a blend of flattery and swagger, and she moves from one boy to the next until she meets Victor Hinson. He is her Mr. Everything, and he is the first who matches her. Through her sixteenth year she is too grown and too fast for her own good, piling up designer clothes, jewelry and street-smart boyfriends.

Her neighbor and friend Raheema takes the opposite road. Raheema works to keep her grades up and holds to the path she has chosen, even as the pressure to drop it grows around her.

This is a coming-of-age novel with a brash, bitter-sweet tone, told with attention to teenage style, status and desire. As the story goes on, Tracy begins to question her life, her goals and her sexuality, and she slowly grows from a so-called flyy girl into a woman.