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Schoolyard - The Day You Said No
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $25.99
ISBN13: 9781068968976
Publisher: Kyle Kalloo Publishing
Published: Jul 12 2026
Pages: 524
Weight: 1.38
Height: 1.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The first time Charlene Dinatale said no, she was ten years old, standing on a wall at recess, and the boy asking was Marc.
Two decades later, she's saying yes to a much bigger stage: Director at Media Connect Corp, one of Toronto's most storied communications firms, walking into a department that isn't sure whether to welcome her or wait her out. The floor has already picked its sides before she arrives. Chad, the manager who expected the promotion himself, adjusts his cuffs and says all the right things while his jaw says something else entirely. Claire, sharp and unreadable, watches everyone, including Charlene, with the patience of someone building a case for her own future. And above them all sits Verna Grant, the VP whose approval is never freely given, a woman who fought hard to be heard in rooms that preferred her silence, and who now tests Charlene's judgment at every turn. Verna doesn't announce her power. She lets a room recalibrate around her and calls that leadership. She becomes, quickly and completely, the boss readers love to hate.
Charlene knows how to read a room like this. She learned it long before Media Connect Corp. What she hasn't decided yet is whether reading it is the same as winning it.
Outside the glass walls, the rest of Charlene's life refuses to stay outside. Marc, the same boy from the schoolyard and now her oldest friend and on-again partner in a relationship that has never once been simple, keeps finding his way back into the spaces she's tried to keep separate from work; a phone call from Dublin, a memory that surfaces in the middle of a client meeting, a version of tenderness that has survived every version of them that didn't work. Behind them both is the house Charlene came from: a Jamaican mother, Yvonne, who taught her that strength doesn't have to be loud to be real, and a Sicilian father, Franco, who taught her that love and discipline can live in the same sentence, and that some people cross an ocean for both.
Schoolyard: The Day You Said No moves between the boardroom Charlene has just claimed and the life she built long before it, between Toronto and the cities that keep pulling at her past, between the version of herself that negotiates for a living and the girl who once said no without needing a reason. It's a story about power that doesn't announce itself, about colleagues who become something closer to family and family that shows up like unfinished business.
Most of all, it's a novel about the one word that has quietly shaped every choice Charlene has made since the day she first said it, to a boy who spent the years since trying to earn a different answer, and about what it costs to hold your professional self and your real self in one hand without letting either one go soft.
Schoolyard is Book One in a planned trilogy, and the first novel from executive coach and author Kyle Kalloo, whose decades inside corporate leadership give this story of ambition, inheritance, and self-possession its unmistakable authority.
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