A fully competent firsthand account of the author's struggles with the aftereffects of molestation.
In her debut memoir, Ross examines the complications involved with being the victim of childhood sexual abuse.
The first corruption occurred on a camping trip, when the author awoke to “sandpaper…crawling on my skin. At least that's what I thought it was, until I felt hot breath against my cheek.” The “hot breath” belonged to her stepfather, a man who lingered near his stepdaughter's bed for years, making her feel “scared and sick.” When Ross reported the transgression to her mother, she denied the claim, preferring to believe that her husband was simply tucking her daughter in. The author’s mother continually served as an accomplice to her husband's crime, rejecting the truth by shrouding herself in “omission and self-imposed blindness.” As Ross grew older and the abuse continued, she began blaming herself, believing it to be a punishment for wearing her nightgown too often or for arousing her stepfather by doing workout videos in the living room. After the author's unsuccessful suicide attempt, her stepfather's crimes came to light, trapping Ross in a downward spiral of foster homes and meetings with welfare services until she enrolled in an art school states away. Ross's seesawing of emotions left her in a constant state of flux, but this uncertainty of emotion is one of the narrative’s primary strengths. Ross continually explores the boundaries of father-daughter intimacy, never demonizing her stepfather, but instead, humanizing him—a far more difficult task. The climactic scene, in which her stepfather fully admits his guilt, is written in screenplay form, allowing both participants to fully express themselves without interruption, though the outcome is a bit melodramatic—a rare misstep in this otherwise tightly wound book.
A fully competent firsthand account of the author's struggles with the aftereffects of molestation.Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7297-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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