Sides Of A Coin
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Dad says my name is a Nigerian Yoruba name meaning "Born Wealthy". Now I wished somebody would wake me up when we became wealthy. I mean we weren't poor or anything but far from wealthy. As we continued driving along the road, I looked over at my dad as he spun that steering wheel like a pro. Prince is his name, well Calvin Prince, to be exact. Now my grandparents gave him a name like that and he names me Abimbola. And my mom Tina was sitting right next to him looking beautiful as she was. She says when she met dad he told her his name was Prince. So she asked for his last name and he said, Prince and she asked "Your name is Prince Prince?" He told her "It's Calvin, but just call me Prince." Mom was 5 years younger than dad. They didn't really have much in common except us. Not that the age difference had anything to do with it. They were just very distant and only got along on occasion or at our expense. She didn't even know how old he was at first because he told her his age didn't matter. Whenever she had to do some sort of business transaction and was asked dad's age it would go like this. "And how old is your husband ma'am?" And she would simply say. "I don't know." This would always leave them looking at her strangely_
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About the Book
Abimbola Prince’s struggle for identity began long before he cut his name in half. Sent to Trinidad as an infant by his father against his mother’s wishes, Abimbola spent his earliest years caught in a silent family tug-of-war. Though his mother eventually reclaimed him at age two to bring him back to his siblings, the roots of disconnection were already planted, leaving a layer of quiet strain on their relationship that follows him into adolescence.
Now a teenager in North America, Abimbola faces a new battleground: the neighborhood gridlock. Cruelly teased by peers who constantly mangle his African first name, and trying to fit into his own immediate family, he makes a desperate choice to erase his identity just to blend in.
Sides of a Coin is a raw, moving contemporary Young Adult novella exploring cultural heritage, family fractures, and teenage self-esteem. Follow one youth’s powerful fight to bridge the gap between his roots and his reality, and discover the true weight of a name before it’s too late.