This short novel is narrated in the present tense by a black poor teen girl who has two children fathered by her father by the time she is sixteen, in the late 80’s Harlem. The guttural slang and description of the most depraved and violent sexual encounters and perversions imaginable would make a drunken sailor blush.
Illiterate, obese, and unschooled, the protagonist finds some elementary reading and writing education in a special school, but much of what she relates in slang and lingo is still unintelligible. She has a very elementary understanding of Langston Hughes’s poetry which she quotes, and worships Louis Farrakhan. The seemingly endless rounds of social agencies seem to do little to help her except for one teacher at the special school.
The NewYork author is an aspiring poet with a MFA from Brooklyn College and incorporates what seems to me to be nonsensical poetry in this bleak story. There is no denouement to the life story- it just stops, followed by a sampling of the writing of the girls in the special school.
Readers should hope that none of this story is from personal experience of the author, but that seems unlikely as novelists usually write about what they have experienced in some way, even when disguised.
2.5/5
Thanks, Carrol A.
The Passionate Reader 