In the following review of Joanne Hyppolite's first novel Seth and Samona, Lyn Miller-Lachmann gives an favorable overview of the novel's plot and its well-sketched characters, but notes that the weakness of the novel may be it's overabundance of subplots and secondary characters, leaving the work feeling less unified than a novel should feel.

Seth Michelin is a proper Haitian-American boy, studious and serious. His sixth-grade classmate, Samona Gemini, is an African-American girl, the child of an artist and a brilliant prankster who is always getting Seth caught up in her schemes. Yet when Seth's older brother, Jean-Claude, goes ballistic over their sister's boyfriend, Seth convinces Samona and her older brother to follow Jean-Claude and stop him before someone gets hurt. To compound Seth's worries, Samona is changing. On a whim, she signs up for a neighborhood beauty pageant. Pretty soon, she is hanging out with a...