The subtitle is apt: Daley-Ward has quite a ferociously moving story to tell.
A powerful, unconventionally structured memoir recounting harrowing coming-of-age ordeals.
Though she earned acclaim for her debut poetry collection, bone (2014), Daley-Ward resists classification in this profound mix of poetry and prose. Her Jamaican mother was sent to live in England during her first, teenage pregnancy. Her father, whom she never met, was Nigerian, married to someone else. The author was raised entirely in England, largely by her maternal grandparents, Seventh-Day Adventists. She discovered her poetic calling on a pilgrimage to Africa, after drugs and depression had left her at the end of her rope. Before then, she had worked as a model and aspired to be a singer, though her most lucrative source of income was sex work. The one main constant in her life has been her younger brother, Roo, who attempted suicide after their mother’s death. Roo had a different father than his sister, who had a different father than their older brother. Their mother subsequently had a series of boyfriends, some of whom played quasi-dad to the offspring none of them had fathered. “I think about these parents of ours / our makers / our stars. (Such impossible, complex stars.),” she writes. “How they came, exploded, / and fell away.” Daley-Ward had developed well before her teens, both physically and mentally, so much that her mother feared her then-boyfriend would have sexual designs on her and sent her to her strict grandparents. She soon became aware of the attention her looks brought her, and she exercised her power to attract men and feared the power they might have over her. She abused alcohol and drugs, both to feel something and not to feel anything, and she found older men willing to support her. Then she got engaged to a man who truly loved her but whom she sensed she didn’t deserve. “I don’t think that I’ll live a particularly long life,” she writes. “It doesn’t bother me. You gather speed when you’re descending.”
The subtitle is apt: Daley-Ward has quite a ferociously moving story to tell.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313262-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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