Lovely Little Shelf

Woo Hoo! Friday!  It’s only 8:30 but this Friday has been amazing so far.  I got to sleep in and get some reading in and I’m pretty much beside myself with happiness.  Not sure what our plans are for today, but it’s beautiful outside and pretty much anything goes.  Day 6 of the review-a-thon and I seriously could not be happier. It is so rewarding to be able to cross these books off of my review list.  It is still kind of silly how long it is, but 6 in one week is a pretty huge deal. Thanks again to everyone who has been participating along side me!

The Book: Push, by Sapphire

The Story: Precious is 16 years old. She lives in Harlem with her awful mother.  She is pregnant. With her father’s baby.  Seriously, it starts of that twisted.  She doesn’t really know how she got pregnant.  That is just one of the many, many things she is ignorant about.

When they kick her out of her normal school for being pregnant, she ends up in a small class of 5 or 6 other students and a determined teacher.  This is her chance to learn and grow and find redemption.

The teacher inspires the students to learn to read, to learn to write and to find freedom through sharing and recording their experiences in a diary.

What I Thought: My only exposure to this book was the preview of the movie they made based off of it called Precious.  From the preview, I thought it was going to be this little uplifting number about a funny, sassy black girl.  They didn’t show, you know, the incest or beatings or any of that.

Because listen to me when I say that this book is DARK.  Especially in the first half I could kind of feel my jaw hanging open.  The living situation that Precious is coming from and the pure ignorance that she was exposed to on a daily basis was almost staggering.  It almost seems unreal that situations like this actually exist, but I know that they do.  I teared up a few times thinking about how for some people this is just their reality.  This horrible, abusive, ignorant mom was one of the worst “villains” that I have ever read. Seriously. She’s awful.

After Precious gets into her new school and starts to do well and make friends and can read a bit here and there, the book kind of took on a “Dangerous Minds” feel.  Come to think of it, these may have been out around the same time? I can’t remember.  Anyway, the teacher was just this amazing woman who didn’t judge the students in her class- she just loved them.  She met them where they were and spoke into their lives in powerful ways.  This is where it started feeling like an inspirational book, but it never tipped over into the cheesy category.

Even though it was a short little book, it was a bit hard to read.  Of course the subject matter is tough no matter what, but it is written from Precious’s point of view, like a diary that she has written.  Because of that the dialect and spelling do get a bit confusing at times.  After a little while it started to flow a little better, but I have to confess that the first few chapters it was choppy and hard for me.

This book speaks to a lot of issues, but the thing that hit me most was this real need for education in poor communities.  The fact that Precious had never heard of HIV, Down Syndrome, or a zillion other things was just staggering, but I know that this was written from true events.  There are grown people out there today that couldn’t read this blog post.  That’s wild, right?  If these are issues that are close to your heart, give up an afternoon to this book.

Conclusion: A tough, gritty book, but worth the read.  If you are in education, I almost feel like this should be required reading.