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brogan7's review
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
3.0
I liked parts of this book a lot, and then other aspects really didn't work for me. The opening with the description of a move in the night from the point of view of a child, was absolutely gripping and had true-to-life details that had me thinking I was going to love this book. The multiple characters with many different circumstances, most of them difficult, gave a strong portrayal of a community as opposed to a single protagonist following a hero's journey trajectory.
However, some things that happened stretched believability to the point where I found it kind of cringy. The parent who defends the literacy worker with a letter--a very literate letter--just didn't make sense with the realities of that family and how generations struggle not only with literacy but with trust of the system (a system that has failed them in many ways). The child who is diagnosed with autism and gets special programming that helps him succeed--the literacy worker who wasn't willing to post a flyer for her own program, who gives the family $50 for the mother to take a taxi to the boy's appointment with a specialist...
Instead of analyzing real problems and illuminating a convergence of disadvantages that are often overwhelming to people and crunch them into poor choices because no choice is the good choice, this book reached for easy answers and betrayed a kind of blindness of the middle class to the realities that people deal with.
There's a line at one point where a parent asks their child to give something up--the older sister surrendering something to her younger brother, and when the girl says yes, she will, the text narrates: "only a neglectful parent could think that was a real yes"--but is that what a child thinks about her own parent? No, that's what a writer thinks from a very great distance and with a lack of compassion for the over-stretched parent just trying to cope, trying to keep both kids happy, one of them more given to tantrums than the other. Calling that a "neglectful parent" says a lot about the writer but doesn't inform the reader about the characters--the ones we really care about.
The one thing I did like about this book is that it asked the question, what does success look like? What does improvement look like? Not one person at a time but a community at a time?--I just wish she had somehow answered that question more fully and more humanly.
However, some things that happened stretched believability to the point where I found it kind of cringy. The parent who defends the literacy worker with a letter--a very literate letter--just didn't make sense with the realities of that family and how generations struggle not only with literacy but with trust of the system (a system that has failed them in many ways). The child who is diagnosed with autism and gets special programming that helps him succeed--the literacy worker who wasn't willing to post a flyer for her own program, who gives the family $50 for the mother to take a taxi to the boy's appointment with a specialist...
Instead of analyzing real problems and illuminating a convergence of disadvantages that are often overwhelming to people and crunch them into poor choices because no choice is the good choice, this book reached for easy answers and betrayed a kind of blindness of the middle class to the realities that people deal with.
There's a line at one point where a parent asks their child to give something up--the older sister surrendering something to her younger brother, and when the girl says yes, she will, the text narrates: "only a neglectful parent could think that was a real yes"--but is that what a child thinks about her own parent? No, that's what a writer thinks from a very great distance and with a lack of compassion for the over-stretched parent just trying to cope, trying to keep both kids happy, one of them more given to tantrums than the other. Calling that a "neglectful parent" says a lot about the writer but doesn't inform the reader about the characters--the ones we really care about.
The one thing I did like about this book is that it asked the question, what does success look like? What does improvement look like? Not one person at a time but a community at a time?--I just wish she had somehow answered that question more fully and more humanly.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Drug use, Addiction, Child death, Emotional abuse, and Fire/Fire injury
Weird spiritual shit at the very end involving a fantasy of the perfect nuclear family
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