Jazmin

Jazmin is the main character of Jazmin's Notebook. She is a fourteen-year-old African American girl who lives with her elder sister in an apartment in a rough area of the Washington Heights section of New York City. Jazmin is a bright girl and a straight A student. She is a natural writer who loves to write poetry and keeps a log of her daily encounters and the people she meets in her notebook. She has aspirations to have a career in writing.

As a very young child, Jazmin and her sister, CeCe, had been placed in a foster home where they had been neglected and abused. Her parents had divorced and her mother suffered from bouts of depression and alcoholism which eventually devolved into a mental disorder requiring extensive hospitalization. At these times, the girls had had to live with relatives or be placed in foster homes. Their...