Blue Popsicles

Blue Popsicles chronicles the 11 years NeAnni Ife spent in the Ohio Soldiers’ & Sailors’ Orphans’ Home in Xenia, Ohio, an institution admired for its palatial buildings, high academic standards and the opportunities all that represented, yet abhorred for its disciplinary treatment of America’s most vulnerable children: orphans. Recounted from a child’s perspective, Blue Popsicles describes in raw emotion intimate parts of her life as a black child whose world turns upside down with the sudden death of her mother, which resulted in her and seven of her nine siblings moving into the orphanage. Her book takes the reader from her parents’ five-room house at 104 Paisley Street in Dayton, Ohio to the orphanage, and details the unfathomable depths to which children must venture to find peace and security amid chaos and inhumanity. Through laughter and tears, readers stated they have found ways to reach beyond retribution for injustice, abuse, suffering and pain to reconciliation and forgiveness.