Diamond Earrings for Baby

Baby has everything she needs to succeed: beauty, talent, a father who has built his life around her, and one-carat diamond earrings she earned herself at nine years old. At eleven, she is the primary breadwinner for a family of nine, and she knows it.  Today is the day everything changes. A television segment on Channel 4 is waiting, and Baby has prepared for it the way she prepares for everything-completely, relentlessly, without the mercy of doubt.
She has called the studio herself. She has drilled her lines until they feel like memory. She knows which camera matters, which angle to hold, and exactly how to describe a childhood that bears almost no resemblance to the one she is actually living. What Baby is not prepared for is the empty garment bag.  Or the window that opens. Or the choice she makes standing on the sill, twelve stories above a city that does not know her name.  Or the note left at the front desk.  Diamond Earrings for Baby is a sharp, unflinching literary novella about the costs of being built to perform-for the child who performs, and for the family that needs her to.
Set in a Yonkers household where a swimming pool is being dug in the backyard, and a math teacher has made very careful calculations, it follows one Saturday in the life of an eleven-year-old who is about to learn something the world has been saving for her.  She has never lost before. She is not going to take this quietly.