[2][3] Mishna Wolff is a little girl growing up in two households of divorced parents with two very different personalities and cultures.

Rainier Valley is a predominantly black and minority neighborhood and Mishna has a difficult time making friends, primarily because she is white.

Mishna has trouble dealing with bullying from her peers, meeting the expectations her father sets for her (no matter how unusual they seem), the pressure she puts on herself, and learning who she is while society is pushing and pulling her into what they want her to be.

She competes with the children in her neighborhood to be the funniest, the meanest, and the toughest while she strives to be rich, successful, and seemingly carefree like her school friends.

After that, it’s still funny — Wolff, like Chris Rock, has a way with presenting brutal truths — but there’s too much real life, and too little reconciliation between Mishna and her dad for “I’m Down” to fit neatly into any bookstore’s “humor” section.