A realistic and disturbing glimpse into an unenviable childhood.
A memoir about a childhood of sexual abuse from debut author Herrera.
Growing up in El Salvador in a fatherless, poor family, young Perto hasn’t had things easy. From working in the fields for little to no money to seeing his mother pregnant again in spite of their economic situation, Perto would likely have faced a difficult life even without the episodes of sexual abuse that end up defining much of his childhood. Beginning with molestation from an acquaintance of his mother’s and escalating to rape and torment from several members of the community, Perto’s story is a horrifying glimpse into the life of an abused child. “When everything started I was seven years old—an innocent boy,” he says. “I was at the mercy of the adults in my life. Those adults, including my mother, were supposed to protect me from abuse, but they did not.” A main tormentor tends to visit Perto’s village on weekends, so the end of the week is dreaded. The explicit descriptions of abuse can be difficult to read: “It felt like a sharp handsaw was ripping the tissue of my rectum.” Attempts to placate the abuser are never successful—“Right away I did what he said because I was afraid of him”—and are met only by abuse from others who learn to view the victim as willing and defenseless. Cries for mercy fall on deaf ears, but how else can a young boy fight against full-grown men who feel no shame in committing unimaginable crimes? With a distinct Christian message, the story of Perto’s salvation from his troubled childhood is one involving lots of prayer and fantastical episodes in nature, including an eagle transforming into an angel ensconced in a rainbow of light. Though the conclusion may lose some readers, the book is notable for its believable downward spiral of abuse. Depictions of many characters prove less than illuminating, particularly as readers might hope for more information about Perto’s village and the people who populate it. Consequently, the story moves quickly, with just enough time to let the horror sink in.
A realistic and disturbing glimpse into an unenviable childhood.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480154230
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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