If you've ever tasted the after-rain clay dirt on a Kansas summer afternoon, or if you've ever secretly wanted to, you may understand why I was often tempted to eat a stick of chalk. It held the smell of that clay dirt.

Irene Wilson knows that a 'no-name invisible something' has settled over her parents' marriage, and suspects her glamorous new teacher is to blame. Irene is not alone in her suspicions. In the town of Rattlebone, a small Black neighbourhood of Kansas City, secrets are hard to keep and growing up is a community affair.

As Irene is initiated into adult passion and loss, her family story takes its place in a tightly woven tapestry of individuals whose griefs and joys are as vivid as her own.

Through the strong smells of manure and bacon wafting downriver from the stockyards, roadhouses playing the latest jazz and radios at Union Hall broadcasting warnings to the low-lying communities along the rivers, Clair has captured an entire world through the eyes of its unforgettable heroine. Rattlebone is a one-of-a-kind triumph of American fiction, for fans of Daphne Palasi Andreades' Brown Girls and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John.