Bo’s new family lives in a brownstone in Harlem, and this location is important to the book’s context and themes. Bo and her new, blended family are African American, and they live in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Harlem, because of its history and culture, is essential to the sense of community and identity that Bo and the rest of the Dwyer-Saunders family experience.

Harlem was originally constructed as an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s. This is why, as compared to Bo and Lola’s tiny, old apartment, the Dwyer-Saunders family lives in a huge brownstone, which can house their entire family and all its pets. However, the neighborhood of Harlem was overdeveloped rapidly, leaving a large number of empty buildings and desperate landlords. A few middle-class Black families moved into the area, triggering an influx of Black residents as the Great Migration of African Americans accelerated in the early 1900s. Several factors, including natural disasters, Jim Crow laws, and the First World War prompted many Black people to move from the rural South to the urban North. The predominance of Black families in Harlem made the neighborhood the preferred place for other new Black families to settle (“

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