Excerpt from One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

King had been more upset by her resistance than she'd expected. "You're a public defender. You do more for our folks and our community than most people, for God's sake," he'd said.

"That doesn't mean I can just up and abandon them," she said.

He stared at her, mouth hanging open for a few seconds, before saying anything. "How is it abandoning? It's not like you're leaving your job. I'm talking about moving to a place with only Black people."

Jasmyn knew her resistance was more emotional than logical, but she couldn't shake the feeling that she'd be losing some part of herself if she moved.

It'd taken an incident with a white cop later in the spring to finally convince her to move.

"We should get going or we'll be late," King says now, and starts the car up. "We got the interior designer at ten and the landscape architect at eleven a.m."

Jasmyn nods. "Maybe we should come back tonight with Kamau so he can see those animatronics lit up and moving," she says as they pull away.

King squeezes her hand. "Good idea."

"Can you imagine his little face when he sees all this?"

King bulges his eyes out, imitating the funny face that Kamau makes when he's amazed by something. They both laugh.

Jasmyn rolls down her window and sticks her arm outside, letting her hand ride the air currents the way she used to as a child. She takes a long breath. Even the air in Liberty smells different, crisp and new. They pass two more Black Santas. A young couple walking with their toddler son and a dog waves to them as they drive by. Jasmyn smiles wide and waves back. In a couple of months she and King and Kamau will be the ones waving to someone new in the neighborhood. Maybe they'd get a dog, too, once they were settled.

She rests her hand on her stomach. It'd taken them years longer than they'd planned to get pregnant again, but their second son is just seven months away. That Liberty, this place of Black splendor, will be all he knows fills her with pride. She imagines that growing up, surrounded on all sides by Black excellence, will plant a seed in both his and Kamau's hearts. It will help them both flourish, secure in the knowledge of their own beauty and self-worth.

Jasmyn reaches across the console and squeezes King's thigh. "You were right, baby," she says. "This is the right move."

Excerpted from One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon. Copyright © 2024 by Nicola Yoon. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.