Push by Sapphire

About a month ago, I went on a car trip to Tallahassee. I was the passenger so I was able to get a little reading done. I was in the middle of a book I had been reading, Push by Sapphire. When I was done, I had tears streaming down my face. I felt so thankful for everything and was inspired to be a light in someone's life.

Push is a story about a teenage girl named Precious. She cannot read or write and knows that she is uneducated. She has been sexually abused by her father, and verbally and mentally abused by her mother for as long as she can remember. At 16, she is pregnant with her father's second child. Because of her lack of book smarts, she lashes out during school to avoid being made fun of. After being held back two years and getting pregnant, her middle school principal suspends her from school but encourages her to enroll in an alternative school. Precious takes this advice and her life begins to turn around. Her reading teacher challenges her to think for herself. She starts to see the world around her in a different light. She begins to realize the home in which she lives is not a good place and begins to act independently. She turns to writing to work through her emotions and puts together amazing poetry.

This book is written in a very unique way--from the point of view of Precious. She cannot read or write when we first begin her story so the text is written phonetically. As Precious' reading and writing abilities develop, the text gets easier to read. It is actually quite interesting the way the author draws us into Precious' world. The language is quite graphic but is appropriate for the context. If you can remember the life that Precious lives, and get beyond the language and sexual situations, I promise you will be inspired when you read this book.

"Claireece Precious Jones endures unimaginable hardships in her young life. Abused by her mother, raped by her father, she grows up poor, angry, illiterate, fat, unloved and generally unnoticed. So what better way to learn about her than through her own, halting dialect. That is the device deployed in the first novel by poet and singer Sapphire. "Sometimes I wish I was not alive," Precious says. "But I don't know how to die. Ain' no plug to pull out. 'N no matter how bad I feel my heart don't stop beating and my eyes open in the morning." An intense story of adversity and the mechanisms to cope with it." --Amazon.com

Here are a few pages from amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0679766758/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-8551803-4692845#reader-link