Veronica Chambers grew up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, a girl who mastered the whirling helixes of double-dutch jump rope with the same ease and finesse she brought to her schoolwork, her often troubled family life, and the demands of being overachieving and underprivileged. "Until I was ten," she writes, "three things were true. We always had a car. We always had a backyard.

And we lived with my father." Hard times set in when Veronica's father quit his job to become a full-time nightclub performer and soon after quit the family, too.

The job of raising Veronica and her little brother, Malcolm X Chambers, was left exclusively to her mother, a Panamanian immigrant whose secretary's salary just barely met the needs of her family. From a young age, Veronica understood that the best she could do for her mother was to be a perfect child - to rewrite her Christmas wish lists to her mother's budget, to look after her difficult brother, to get by on her own.

More than a family memoir, Mama's Girl gives voice to the first generation of African-Americans to come of age in the post-Civil Rights era.