DON'T ERASE ME: Stories

by Carolyn Ferrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 1997

The eight stories in this debut collection, mostly focusing on girls in the 'hood, mingle a welcome touch of poetry with rough urban realism. The familiar underclass pathologies surface in Ferrell's fiction: families with absent fathers; incest; domestic violence; and, most importantly, teenage pregnancy. More than half of these first-person narratives are in the voice of girls who hope to escape the casual horrors of the streets (in the South Bronx) and somehow imagine a baby as their means to happiness. Seldom do the fathers care beyond the status symbol of their potency. In the title story, a young mother records a backwards diary from the moment she discovered her stepfather had infected her with HIV. In ""Can You Say My Name?,"" a pregnant teenager, full of delusional plans for her future, rejects real love for the abusive father of her child, and seems to find an erotic charge in her violent relations with him. ""Country of the Spread Out God"" alternates the voices of two foster siblings, one pregnant by the other, both rejected by the Jamaican aunt who raised them. The girlish boy in ""Proper Library"" avoids the problems of street life with his homosexuality, which keeps him from gang activity. Similarly rejected by her peers, the geeky girl of ""TigerFrame Glasses"" reworks harsh reality into fantasies that she records in her journal. The remaining three pieces are all told from the perspective of a teenaged girl, the child of a white German mother and a black American. In one, she and her mother and siblings run from their father's violence, and she retreats into the perfect world of teen magazines; in ""Miracle Answer,"" the same girl scans her neighborhood for a suitable father figure; and in ""Inside, a Fountain,"" her mother sends her to her German relatives, with whom she discovers a strong bond. More than simple authenticity, Ferrell offers a complex vision of ghetto life mingling hurt and hope: work satisfying as art, and disturbing as sociology.

Pub Date: June 11, 1997

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997

Categories: FICTION