An inspiring, intelligent memoir focused on the challenges of advocacy.
Groff’s memoir revisits the formative family law cases she took on at the beginning of her career as an attorney.
In 1984, Groff was a young attorney freshly arrived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to work for legal aid. While observing a custody hearing, she found the first person in desperate need of her help—a young mother with no attorney struggling to maintain custody of her 16-year-old daughter. Showing her profound dedication from the start, Groff didn’t hesitate to jump in from the court room’s audience and help. As the first of many stories from the early years of her legal career, this first exchange shows the passion and urgency with which Groff acts for every client she accepted and every unjust policy she fought. The author notes that becoming a lawyer wasn’t part of her original career plan. As a mother living in the Pennsylvania countryside, she’d tried numerous odd jobs, like taxi driving and working at a sock factory, before slowly completing her college degree. Shortly before graduating, she had her first real encounter with domestic abuse and the legal challenges victims face. The police completely dismissed her terrified neighbor who was fleeing her abuser. (“Sorry, lady. It’s policy. We don’t do domestics,” 911 told her curtly while a man was breaking down her door with a hatchet.) Hoping to make some small, positive change within the system, Groff began law school at 37, focusing in particular on family law. After graduating, she worked for legal aid in Lewistown, Pennsylvania. There, she continually sought to get women out of abusive situations and navigate the laws that neglected to protect them from their own spouses (“Only homicide seemed to qualify as an actual crime in domestic violence”). Groff soon transferred to Bucks County, where she settled into a small office and continued to work against unfair policies wherever possible.
The memoir follows the lawyer’s trajectory through her departure from legal aid and the founding of her own firm in 1996. The cases she recounts range from harrowing to infuriating: The police shrugged away potential murders as suicides, children were left unsupervised with dangerous fathers with devastating results, doctors assumed that struggling young mothers must be alcoholics. Each episode carries a tremendous punch, as well as a searing lesson about the failings of society to help those in need. Groff deftly narrates her personal experiences to set engrossing scenes, like a last-minute courtroom speech to keep a baby out of protective services or the immense relief from a colleague’s simple affirmation, while never losing sight of the bigger picture. “Abusers do not think of themselves as criminals,” she writes in one of the many examples of the smart, big-picture analysis she offers. Despite such heavy details and subject matter, Groff balances her book with warmth and humor. (Her descriptions of failing as a taxi cab driver are laugh out loud funny.) While she remains relatable until the end, never shying away from describing her own self-doubt, she’s also careful to keep the law and her clients in the spotlight. “This was the work I was meant to do,” Groff writes, and readers will certainly feel that inspiring dedication coming through on every page.
An inspiring, intelligent memoir focused on the challenges of advocacy.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781953943477
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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