The Townsend Girls

Chryselle Walker is nine years old when her mother drags a suitcase with a broken wheel through the August heat and into The Townsend - a luxury hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side where Nadine has just been hired as a housekeeper. They move into Room 4C on the service floor. The window shows a sliver of Central Park. The towels have someone else's name on them. Erica Townsend is nine years old and lives on the twenty-second floor.
Her family owns the building. She has everything a girl could want and no one to share it with - until she wanders into a stairwell and finds Chryselle reading a book in the fluorescent light. What begins as an unlikely friendship between two girls separated by eighteen floors and everything those floors represent becomes something more complicated when the world outside the hotel starts telling them who they are to each other.
At school, Chryselle shines without trying. Erica watches from the edge. And the small cruelties begin - a driver sent away, a wake-up call that never comes, a word dropped in the back seat of a car that changes everything. The Townsend Girls is a story about race, class, and the friendships that form inside the gap between charity and belonging. It is about mothers who build homes out of nothing and daughters who learn to walk through the front door.
It is about the difference between having a place to live and having somewhere you belong. For readers of Jacqueline Woodson, Tayari Jones, and anyone who has ever loved someone across a distance that neither of you chose.