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shannenlc 's review for:
In this memoir, Kerry Hudson draws on her personal experience of growing up in poverty and living in some of the UK's poorest towns, to explore the sociological causes and effects of being poor. She traces her childhood and adolescent years describing the struggles and tragedies she faced including but not limited to her family's history of mental illness and addiction, being the victim of sexual assault and living in foster care. As part of her research, she revisits the towns she lived in throughout her turbulent younger years including Aberdeen, Canterbury, Airdrie, North Shields, Coatbridge, Great Yarmouth and Hetton. She investigates how these towns have changed since she lived there, the issues that they are facing currently, the type of communities that still live there and how much they resemble what they did when she lived there as a child.
It's raw, honest and eye-opening. There's a hidden class of people living in extreme poverty in the UK that are overlooked and forgotten, and we need more stories out there in the world. Hudson poured her heart and soul into writing this book and it shows. She acknowledges the privelege she has to be able to write about these experiences having escaped the poverty she was born into. Despite having climbed the social ladder, she's still aware of class issues in the UK and genuinely cares about the development of the poor communities she visits.
Whilst I do appreciate how much emotional and mental resillience and courage it must've taken for the author to write this memoir, it was a pretty average 3 star reading experience. It felt a bit meandering and lacked a central point. I also found the chapters where Hudson visited the towns to be uneventful and generally pointless in terms of what they brought to the book. I think this memoir is valuable to opening people's eyes to the class divide and extreme poverty that persists in the UK, but besides that I didn't take anything much of value from this and don't feel like it contributed anything new or unique to the discussion around class in the UK.
It's raw, honest and eye-opening. There's a hidden class of people living in extreme poverty in the UK that are overlooked and forgotten, and we need more stories out there in the world. Hudson poured her heart and soul into writing this book and it shows. She acknowledges the privelege she has to be able to write about these experiences having escaped the poverty she was born into. Despite having climbed the social ladder, she's still aware of class issues in the UK and genuinely cares about the development of the poor communities she visits.
Whilst I do appreciate how much emotional and mental resillience and courage it must've taken for the author to write this memoir, it was a pretty average 3 star reading experience. It felt a bit meandering and lacked a central point. I also found the chapters where Hudson visited the towns to be uneventful and generally pointless in terms of what they brought to the book. I think this memoir is valuable to opening people's eyes to the class divide and extreme poverty that persists in the UK, but besides that I didn't take anything much of value from this and don't feel like it contributed anything new or unique to the discussion around class in the UK.