Imagine Me is a riveting story of a young black girl's journey growing up in the early '60s. The setting is Detroit where dreams are formed from life experiences within a city ghetto. A coming-of-age story set during the height of the civil rights movement, this was a time of music, baseball, and fishing on the Detroit River, a time of developing and discovering identity.

The memoir gives a detailed accounting of how a self-described "good girl" copes with the early tragedies of childhood loss and abandonment. Growing from a child having children to the becoming of a woman who...