A raw, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting story of trauma, loss, and the healing power of words.
For award-winning children’s and YA author Grimes (Between the Lines, 2018, etc.), writing, faith, and determination were the keys to surviving her tumultuous childhood.
In the face of her father’s abandonment and the revolving door of her alcoholic mother’s psychiatric hospital stays, Grimes becomes savvier and more resilient than any young child should have to be. After being abused by a babysitter when she was 3, Grimes and her beloved older sister, Carol, enter another set of revolving doors: foster care, sometimes loving, sometimes not. At a dark moment when she is 6, Grimes finds escape and comfort in prayer and writing. Despite the instability and danger she endures, Grimes blossoms into a gifted teen with a passion for books, journaling, and poetry. Her personal, political, and artistic awakenings are intertwined, with the drama of her family life unfolding against the backdrop of pivotal moments in Civil Rights–era America. Grimes recounts her story as a memoir in verse, writing with a poet’s lyricism through the lens of memory fractured by trauma. Fans of her poetry and prose will appreciate this intimate look at the forces that shaped her as an artist and as a person determined to find the light in the darkest of circumstances.
A raw, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting story of trauma, loss, and the healing power of words. (Verse memoir. 12-adult)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62979-881-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Wordsong/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Readers will come away feeling inspired by Rawl’s work as an HIV/AIDS speaker and anti-bullying advocate.
Rawl’s journey from secrecy to acceptance thanks to her friends and family makes for a compelling memoir.
As a child, Paige saw her daily doses of medicine as normal—not strange at all. It wasn’t until she was in sixth grade that her mother told her that Paige had been born with HIV. That revelation ends her idyllic life in Indianapolis, forever transforming the energetic girl who did cheerleading, pageants and soccer. Because when Paige tells her best friend, Yasmine, about her HIV-positive status, the news spreads through her middle school, prompting bullies to target Paige and accuse her of having AIDS. Now known as “PAIDS,” Paige loses interest in school, suffers from stress-induced pseudo-seizures and even attempts suicide. But slowly, thanks to counseling, time at a camp for kids affected by HIV/AIDS and all her friends, Paige learns how to forgive and move on with her life. Rawl and Benjamin deftly capture the mindset of middle schooler Paige with anecdotes that reveal the teen’s innocence and naïveté, tracking her progress toward adulthood. They tackle tough subjects such as suicide delicately but honestly.
Readers will come away feeling inspired by Rawl’s work as an HIV/AIDS speaker and anti-bullying advocate. (author’s note, further resources) (Nonfiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-234251-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
PROFILES
Emotionally profound, necessary reading.
A distinguished NYU law professor and MacArthur grant recipient offers the compelling story of the legal practice he founded to protect the rights of people on the margins of American society.
Stevenson began law school at Harvard knowing only that the life path he would follow would have something to do with [improving] the lives of the poor.” An internship at the Atlanta-based Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in 1983 not only put him into contact with death row prisoners, but also defined his professional trajectory. In 1989, the author opened a nonprofit legal center, the Equal Justice Initiative, in Alabama, a state with some of the harshest, most rigid capital punishment laws in the country. Underfunded and chronically overloaded by requests for help, his organization worked tirelessly on behalf of men, women and children who, for reasons of race, mental illness, lack of money and/or family support, had been victimized by the American justice system. One of Stevenson’s first and most significant cases involved a black man named Walter McMillian. Wrongly accused of the murder of a white woman, McMillian found himself on death row before a sentence had even been determined. Though EJI secured his release six years later, McMillian “received no money, no assistance [and] no counseling” for the imprisonment that would eventually contribute to a tragic personal decline. In the meantime, Stevenson would also experience his own personal crisis. “You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it,” he writes. Yet he would emerge from despair, believing that it was only by acknowledging brokenness that individuals could begin to understand the importance of tempering imperfect justice with mercy and compassion.
Emotionally profound, necessary reading.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9452-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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