Arika Gets It

Having grown up in a white town with two professional parents, Arika has never lacked material comfort.
But at age sixteen, she makes two important discoveries about what she has been missing: black culture
and her real father.
Determined to get what she wants, Arika learns that her biological father is a black convict in the prison where both her parents work. When she takes a series of actions that create unexpected problems, she learns to choose carefully what to go after.

from Chapter 1:
I looked across the table at Daddy and then at Mama and suddenly it hit me—I couldn't be their daughter! I was darker than either of them. My little sister Shandra was somewhere between Mama's coffee-with-cream color and Daddy's cream-with-coffee. I was milk-chocolate.
For over sixteen years I'd been blind to the obvious. Why hadn't I thought of it before? I didn't look like any of them, really. Well, I did have Mama's pretty smile and her big dark eyes and long lashes. And Daddy's hair. But I was tall and thin, while the three of them were built solid.
My head was buzzing with new thoughts. I couldn't have been adopted, because we had snapshots of Mama nursing me in the hospital the day I was born. So Mama was my mama. But the stinger was this: Daddy wasn't my daddy!