“On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.” –“The First Day” from Lost in City by Edward P. Jones

For the last 19 years I’ve lived across the road from an elementary school and at the beginning of every September I’m reminded of the line above.

Lost in the City is a collection of 14 stories. The author, a native of Washington D.C., writes about the ordinary residents of the city: “I had read James Joyce’s Dubliners, and I was quite taken with what he had done and I set out to give a better picture of what the city is like—the other city. The book starts with the youngest character and ends with the oldest character.

In Lost in the City, the story of “The First Day” chronicles a young girl’s first day of school. The story is told from the young girl’s point of view. The story opens with her describing how she gets ready by drawing a picture of the style of her hair and the outfit she wears including her new shoes that she loves. As the story progresses we learn that the narrator and her mom went to the wrong school and now have to travel and register for the new school in town. Unlike the old school, which was a familiar structure of their community but run-down, the new school was shiny and new and represents the unknown. The young girl’s mom doesn’t know how to read so she pays someone to help fill the paperwork out and the mom gives the helper 50 cents for her help. The story ends with the five-year-old girl listening to her mother’s footsteps as she walks away. When reading the story, the author stresses the value of education through the amount of effort the family and the community put into the first day of school.

Lost in the City won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1993 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.