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4.52 AVERAGE
4.52 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Really beautiful story that I could relate to. Families are hard. And the authors honest and vulnerable portrayal of her family is just amazing. I’m taking away 0.5 starts because I felt like a lot of the poetry was lost on me lol
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Absolutely beautiful! The writing .. the story .. all of it. This is the best Memoir I’ve ever read and one that will always be so special to me.
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Started slow but become more and more engaging as the protagonist became more aware of the destructive nature of her father and discovered her own strength. At the end I found it hard to put down. Complex and incredibly poetic, but not in an overbearing way.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
relaxing
tense
medium-paced
Wow, this was an incredibly powerful memoir that I’m surprised was on a Read with Jenna list. This book challenged me and my blind assumptions on a lot of things, namely Rastafari as a lifestyle and its integration (or lack thereof) in Jamaican society. To be perfectly honest, there wasn’t much I knew at all about it, and to hear about all aspects of it from someone who knew it most intimately was powerful. I also appreciated Sinclair’s notes about Jamaican political history and how that informed Rastafari; it wasn’t as though she as the author felt that she had to educate her white readers, but that she laid out threads of information that I as the reader could then pull to learn more about this part of the world that, embarrassingly, I’m only really aware of insofar as it’s portrayed in the media.
I can’t imagine the effort that it took to write this book and compile years and years and years of hardships. She describes some of that pain, but I truly can’t imagine the weight of it. It felt like an honor to be able to explore the most vulnerable parts of a person’s life, especially when those difficult moments seemed never ending.
At times, however, that never-endingness of heartbreak and hurt and pain was hard to get through. That feels bad to say about someone’s lived experience, but practically going year by year through traumas that were often repeated, promises and outlets that came oh so close to finally coming to fruition, etc. felt like a relentless weight and seemed to extend the story indefinitely. However, this could have been by design to simulate that stifling sense of feeling stuck that offers a more full sense of completeness once it is finally achieved.
Overall, this was a really powerful book that I’m glad I got to explore. Sinclair is a powerful writer and while I don’t know if I would necessarily pick up one of her books of poetry, I would be interested to read a novel of hers.
I can’t imagine the effort that it took to write this book and compile years and years and years of hardships. She describes some of that pain, but I truly can’t imagine the weight of it. It felt like an honor to be able to explore the most vulnerable parts of a person’s life, especially when those difficult moments seemed never ending.
At times, however, that never-endingness of heartbreak and hurt and pain was hard to get through. That feels bad to say about someone’s lived experience, but practically going year by year through traumas that were often repeated, promises and outlets that came oh so close to finally coming to fruition, etc. felt like a relentless weight and seemed to extend the story indefinitely. However, this could have been by design to simulate that stifling sense of feeling stuck that offers a more full sense of completeness once it is finally achieved.
Overall, this was a really powerful book that I’m glad I got to explore. Sinclair is a powerful writer and while I don’t know if I would necessarily pick up one of her books of poetry, I would be interested to read a novel of hers.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced