There are only two kinds of people in the world: The caught, and the uncaught. In UNFADEABLE, Indiana author, Maurice Broaddus, features both, and provides the reader with a thought-provoking story about the power, resilience, strength, and determination of young people, and how adults underestimate these rising voices.
This journey begins when we meet thirteen-year-old Isabella “Bella” Fades, a smart, confident brown girl with a black belt in bad attitude. Her salty nature can be blamed on losing both parents, hustling to survive, and dodging child protective services by hiding in an abandoned house with no electricity or running water. She inherited her mother’s talent as a tagger, and paints beautiful graffiti art around her neighborhood, under the pen name, UNFADEABLE.
It’s summertime, school’s out, and Bella chooses to attend a snooze-worthy neighborhood meeting for three reasons:
- She can plug in her prepaid phone to charge it.
- Free snacks and drinks.
- To ask the community leaders, one who is Ms. Campbell, a lady who she likes, to invest in a neighborhood arts program to help combat summer boredom.
The main community leader refuses to take her seriously, and Bella’s frustration speaks for her, especially when it is revealed what the neighborhood money has been invested in. When an old man named M, who lives in her neighborhood, along with Aaries, a teenage boy M mentors, offers Bella the opportunity to get her questions answered by learning how to “follow the money trail,” Bella cautiously accepts the challenge.
Broaddus paints internal and external havoc in his main character’s life as she makes critical mistakes that not only put her in danger, but also threaten the well-being of M and Aaries. What starts as a simple request for an art program becomes a deep dive into a political swamp.
Threats, intimidation, even Bella’s worst fear become reality as she gets closer to revealing what happened to the funds that were designated for her neighborhood. The biggest reveal is in Bella’s transition, and how Broaddus fully develops her to keep those attributes that make her strong, and slowly strip away the layers of pain that keep her from moving forward.
I found it strange that Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary didn’t have the word “Unfadeable,” only unfadable, even though that definition would have fit. But the Urban Dictionary had UNFADEABLE and termed it as meaning unstoppable. I believe that to be the point Maurice Broaddus is making about our youth. They are unstoppable, and the worst thing we can do as adults, is not take them seriously.
