Check Out Precious Brought To You By Sapphire Distributed In Electronic Text

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Αγνοείστε την ταινία. Διαβάστε το. Holy hell this book hits you straight in the guts right from the beginning and doesn't let up.
Raw and powerful the writing style gives it an authenticity that gets to you, although it got slightly on my nerves after awhile.
You immediately feel sorry for this poor girl, The abuse too much at times, ugly awful, So glad there is a a silver lining at the end of all this with a glimmer of hope to hang onto Precious is sixteen years old,illiterate and pregnant for the second time with her fathers child.
She is beaten and sexually abused by both her parents and bullied at school, She believes she is ugly and worthless, Then she is placed in an

alternative teaching programme, where she learns to read and write, This is a harrowing read but I admire the way the author, Sapphire, constructed her writing and really allowed Precious to shine.
You will cheer Precious to the end as she learns to love herself and strive for a better life for herself and her children.
The story is a typical ghetto tragedy of a young uneducated girl who's raped by her father and severely abused also raped by her mother.
She ends up having two children by her dad, one of which who has Downs Syndrome, She also sadly ends up contacting the HIV virus from him as well,
I feel the author took the easy way out in making the book too shockingly vulgar, which is the only thing I felt held this novel together.
The writer definitely tried too hard in that aspect of the story, and I wasn't really impressed by it.
It's a shame the Philadelphia Inquire proclaimed this book may find a place in the AfricanAmerican literary canon.
If that's true, What does this say about AfricanAmerican literature not very much,
This storyline has been done so many times in literature and especially in film,
I think people are more like 'oooh this book is so good because her father rapes her and she says she likes it'.
I myself am not so easily convinced,
Also Precious Jones' ignorant talk sounded more like bad ghetto Yorkshire than a girl who is simply ignorant and uneducated.
Just because she couldn't read or write doesn't mean she shouldn't be able to speak, I knew people who grew up in bad situations who couldn't read or write, they spoke fine.
The writer makes her talk like she's been living in a basement foryears,
One thing I did like about the story is how the teacher had each of girls create a private journal as a way for them to communicate back and forth and express themselves about difficult issues they weren't comfortable talking about face to face with their teacher or counselors/social workers.
The journals provided the girls with a sense of anonymity they needed in order to talk about the horrendous things they had to endure in their day to day home life.


I would love to enjoy a good piece of urban literature, but this was so far from it.



I love this book, I hate this book.
I'm a binge reader I can swallow whole apage novel from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon.
It took meweeks to read this huge short book, I had to put it down when I felt how little Precious thought of herself, I had to put it down when her mother admits her role in her child's abuse, I had to put it down so I could think of ways to kill this fictional pitiful girl's fictional stepfather.
He is, as the Sweet Potato Queens would call him, "A Blood Spud, " All I know is I kept putting it down to bawl, to mourn the loss of every child who is born to monsters like Mary and that man.
The fact that it is "just" fiction doesn't matter a lick, The reality base for this fiction is haunting and painful, I hope I am like Miz Rain to the kids who come into my classroom in that kind of pain.
Loved this story!

I read this book years ago when it first came out and as a teenager I didn't really appreciate the importance of this story.
Even seeing the movie didn't change my outlook, But now, as a mature adult retreading this novel created a whole new experience, The grit included in this story is enough to bring tears to any eye,

I must watch the movie again, . . I encountered this when it was excerpted in the New Yorker around the time of itspublication, when I was a senior in high school.
Reading the New Yorker piece effectively shattered my skull, bludgeoning my brain into a tenderized and confused lump of quaking grey gristle.


Push is written in the voice of an impoverished, illiterate, uncared for, despised, abused, obese, neglected, friendless, and seriously fucked teenage black girl living ins Harlem ground zero, at that time, of racialized poverty, the crack epidemic, AIDS, and pretty much every other attendant innercity nightmare you can think of.
The main character's voice is so violently affecting that I lack adequate words to describe what reading this was like for me.
For several days afterwards, I thought of it constantly I mean constantly, from when I woke up in the morning until I went to bed at night, and nearly every moment in between.
Sapphire's writing gave me the uniquely visceral experience of having left my own life and consciousness to inhabit the body and mind of an individual whose experiences polar opposite of my own strained the limits of imaginable human suffering.
I have never read anything else in my entire life that so completely and effectively forced my mind into occupying that of a fictional character, let alone one so completely different from me in every single respect, save gender and nationality.
I felt, while reading this, that I lost all critical sense of distance and observation, and actually in a very significant way became the character Precious.
And this experience of becoming her was so horrific and terrifying that I likely experienced symptoms of what mental health providers refer to as "vicarious trauma" the result of bearing witness to another person's experience of intensely traumatic events.


Okay, okay, so you get it already: this book had a huge impact on me.
So why only four

The novel was unable to sustain the intensity of the shorter New Yorker piece, and had several significant flaws.
For one thing, Push seemed to me at the time to suffer from what is known as "JudetheObscure Syndrome," i.
e. , the ceaseless litany of Precious's sufferings started to seem almost ridiculous after awhile: she's not just raped by her dad, she's also raped by her mom of course Precious gets AIDS and so does her baby.
on and on and on, I haven't reread this since it came out mostly because I'm scared it wouldn't be so amazing as I remember but I'm curious if I'd respond differently to this after working for several years in social services, now that I've seen for myself that in fact who knew! some people's lives really are exactly this bad.


The other problem with this book is that it displays several diagnostic criteria for "Social Novel Disorder," which is to say, the power of the narrative is undermined by a sense of the author's understandable agenda, and of a rather artificial plot trajectory in which Precious encounters a Sapphirelike it seemed to me at the time social worker and thereby begins her healing and empowerment, learning in the process to read and to surrender her misguided and intolerant homophobic views.
Of course, I might appreciate this optimistic ending a lot more now than I did at, when it struck me as inorganic and corny.


I have to reread this novel, and I will soon, I'm very curious to see whether the writing still exerts the same power and force I remember, and also whether my own aging and experiences in the years since will have changed my response to what seemed like serious flaws on my first read.
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