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mrs_a_is_a_book_nerd's Reviews (456)
This memoir is, indeed, raw and brave, honest and real. I'm glad I read it. It has many moments that made my breath catch, many passages that left me thinking, "Wow." In it, Gay relates--without graphic detail, but painfully, nonetheless--her experience of being gang-raped at age 12 by a boy that she cared for. From this incident, she traces her difficult and painful relationship with her body, the destructive choices she made in her personal life, relationships, family, and more, as well as her meditations on how society treats "fat" people.
The narrative is brave and certainly must have been painful to write. So I feel guilty that I can't agree with the many 4+-star ratings. However, I felt like someone should have been courageous enough to help her edit it, to guide her in the process of streamlining, connecting, making a cohesive product. It's ironic to me that I'm complaining that the book is "too big," but I am. It needed condensing to remove the repetitiveness that I feel stole power from her observations, her memories, her life.
The narrative is brave and certainly must have been painful to write. So I feel guilty that I can't agree with the many 4+-star ratings. However, I felt like someone should have been courageous enough to help her edit it, to guide her in the process of streamlining, connecting, making a cohesive product. It's ironic to me that I'm complaining that the book is "too big," but I am. It needed condensing to remove the repetitiveness that I feel stole power from her observations, her memories, her life.
Very interesting and captivating story. I think the parts that are most jarring are not necessarily what was intended as most jarring, I think. I think to understand the main points of the book, a reader would have to be at least a little bit "woke."
I leave my rating at 4 stars from before; I was re-reading to determine suitability for a whole-class novel. This isn't it for our community, but it's still a GREAT book that I would put into the hands of many of my Jr/Sr readers!
I'm not even sure how to describe this book: Sweet? Suspenseful? Haunting? Tragic? All of the above. The sweet vignettes of the friendship between Claudia and Monday, of Claudia's blossoming and coming into herself; the suspense of what happened to Monday; the haunting realities of poverty and desperation; the tragedy of the cracks that split our world and swallow beautiful souls. Definitely a sobering read.
I've read many Holocaust-era novels, but none from the post-liberation perspective. This one is a well-written tale woven into one from a collection of research of many stories. I highly recommend this novel as a reminder that the atrocities of the Holocaust did not end at liberation, and that survivors who made lives for themselves that even approached "normal" did so by sheer will and resolve; "resilience" does not begin to describe what they needed to summon to go on.