The first original work by a living author to become part of the series, Grillo captures the joys and sorrows of York City, a thriving factory town populated by emigrant cigar-makers that slowly faded away as he grew to adulthood and was absorbed into the African-American community during the Depression. The book follows Grillo through his childhood and his days in an African-American unit in the China-Burma-India theater of operations during World War II.

"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."