The first time I ever heard of this book was when it appeared in my mailbox. Sometime last year, I got involved with an online book club through The Nervous Breakdown. The Nervous Breakdown is a fascinating website that a whole bunch of different authors contribute to. You are bound to find something though-provoking, (in more ways than one), at TNB.

I finished Pictures of You within the month that I received it, but somehow, never quite got around to writing a book review of it. Shortly before writing this review, I checked the TNB website to find out when their book club talked about this book. I was certain I’d missed it, but, oddly enough, it turns out they are going to discuss this book on January 30, 2012. I never would have known it if I hadn’t gone searching for that information tonight. How lucky!

Another thing that prompted me to decide to write this book review tonight has to do with the Halfway Around the World podcast. It is a music (and more) type of podcast, that is on the Dawnforge network.

I host the show with Nathan Lott, who has written many excellent book reviews for Book Sandwich. He and I are intending to mention this book in the next episode that we record together, around ten hours from now. I find that I work better when I have a deadline to hit, and so, I made that my deadline for writing this review.

But, enough about why I read the book, and why I’m writing the review.

Pictures of You is a book about two women who are trying to escape their marriages, (for entirely different reasons). At the start of the book, readers are inside the head of Isabelle, who has just left her husband.

Isabelle is a photographer, who had been working at one of those studios where parents bring their babies to have a professional portrait taken. This, by itself, is somewhat heartbreaking, because Isabelle cannot have children, (but desperately wants one). Part of the reason why she has left her husband has something to do with this issue.

She is driving down a foggy road, very upset, and thinking about when she and her husband first got to know each other. Visibility is almost zero. She doesn’t see the car that is parked lengthwise across the road ahead of her until she crashes into it.

Later, as she is going through the healing process, she learns more about the car accident she was involved in. A woman and her son were in the car. The woman, named April, had taken her son, Sam, out of school that fateful day, and was driving to a location that only she was aware of. April died when the crash happened, but Sam survived, unharmed.

Readers later discover where April was going. She was leaving her husband, but her reasons for doing so were completely different from the reasons why Isabelle was leaving hers. Those reasons were something that April had been keeping a secret before she died.

This is one of those stories that indirectly asks readers some uncomfortable questions. How well do you really know the person that you love? Would you be able to forgive the person that you love after that person has done something absolutely unforgivable? Should you?

There are several chapters in this book that take place from the viewpoint of April’s husband Charlie, who is grieving the loss of his wife, while still trying to be a good parent to his son, (who has asthma). Leavitt really captured the way the world becomes so draining, and bewildering, for many people after a loved one has passed away. You can almost physically feel what Charlie is going through.

Isabelle becomes almost obsessed with trying to find out more about the family of the woman she unintentionally killed. It feels like she wants to make sure that they are “okay”, perhaps to reduce her intense feelings of guilt over what she has done. Eventually, she starts stalking them.

As you may have guessed these three characters, Isabelle, Charlie, and Sam, do wind up meeting each other. Their lives came together the instant the car crash happened, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before they ended up connecting with each other.

Isabelle begins bonding with Sam over photography, which she is trying to teach him about. Isabelle and Charlie both have a vast emptiness inside themselves that aches to be filled, and whole, once again. Of course, they meet. Of course, they find a strong connection with each other. All three are in a great deal of pain that was caused by the exact same incident. It is a strange thing to have in common.

I won’t say how the book ends, except to say that the ending isn’t what you might assume it would be. This isn’t the type of story that includes a simple “happily ever after” ending, painted in bright, shiny colors. That is not to say that the ending was entirely sad, only that it was complex, just like life can often be.

I found this book, and the characters in it, to be completely compelling. I wish I wasn’t so busy right now, so I could read this book a second time before the book club meets.

** An update: Upon further investigation, it appears that the TNB Book Club still exists, but they are no longer doing the online “chat room” part of it anymore. However, Brad Listi is doing a wonderful podcast called “Other People”. He just spoke with author Caroline Leavitt in Episode 39 of the podcast. I think that is pretty darn cool!

The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 and 1964 during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. There is some talk about what is going on around them such as the murder of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, but the book centers around two black maids in particular and the white women they serve. Aibileen is the maid for Elizabeth Lefolt and basically raises Elizabeth’s daughter Mae-Mobley. In fact, her favorite part of the job is helping to raise the children ever since her own child was killed. She tells Mae Mobley that she is kind and smart like she wants to drill those notions into her because Elizabeth just can’t be bothered to show any affection to her own child. Elizabeth is friends with Hilly Holbrook, the president of the Junior League, and they have their bridge club every Monday at Elizabeth’s house.

Hilly is the supreme racist and ultimately the antagonist or villain in the book. Toward the beginning of the novel, she starts an initiative to install separate bathrooms out in the garage for the maids because they shouldn’t be using the same bathrooms the whites use in the house. Another member of the bridge club is Skeeter Feelan who is also the editor of the Junior League newsletter. She wants to be a writer and in order to get something on her resume, she starts writing the housecleaning column for the Jackson newspaper. Of course she doesn’t know anything about cleaning so she starts asking Aibileen for some help. Skeeter doesn’t have the hangups about race that everyone else, especially Hilly, seems to have, and she is disgusted by Hilly’s comments on the matter.

Aibileen’s best friend is another maid named Minnie. Minnie is sassy, no-nonsense and she has to watch what she says around her white employers so that she doesn’t get into big trouble from. She is fired from Hilly’s mother’s employment when Mrs. Walters has to go into nursing care. The way Hilly fired her so incensed Minnie that she did something to Hilly that becomes one of the cruxes in the whole plot. Hilly tries to get her barred from employment anywhere in Jackson, but Minnie manages to find work for a previously poor (but has married up), outcast woman named Celia who desperately wants to fit in with Hilly’s group, but Hilly doesn’t want anything to do with her.

This sets the background for the main story. Skeeter comes up with an idea to write a book about the good and bad things the black maids have encountered while working for white women. It is tremendously risky and horrible things could happen to both Skeeter and any maid that helped out by being interviewed for the book. Only Aibileen, at first agrees (reluctantly) to help, and Aibileen finally convinces Minnie to help as well. The struggle is to try and get a dozen maids to agree to be interviewed. It takes a horrible thing done to Hilly’s maid for a good number of them to get on board.

I thought this book was very interesting, and I especially enjoyed listening to the Audible version. It was read by four different women; one who read Skeeter’s chapters; one who read Aibileen’s chapters; one who read Minnie’s chapters; and inexplicably a fourth that read one chapter about a memorable Junior League Gala Benefit. One of the readers even played that character in the movie version. All of them did a fantastic job of narrating, but I really enjoyed the Aibileen and Minnie chapters the most. Stockett has faced some controversy and criticism for writing from the African American perspective, but I think she wrote a really compelling story about an important time in recent American history.

Talk about a page turner! This was the first book in a long while that made me want to walk an extra mile so that I could continue listening to it. It also ends in a place where I want to continue to read the next book in the trilogy. The story is gripping and full of action, but there is also some romance and dystopian future kind of stuff. From the first chapter, the story had me going and there was never a dull moment.

It is the future and North America is ruled by a Capital located in the Rocky Mountains and surrounded by 12 districts (the 13th was wiped out). There was an uprising against the Capital, but the rebels couldn’t scale past the mountains and the rest of the districts were crushed. The hero of the story, Catness Everdean, is a young 16 year old girl from district 12. Catness sneaks beyond the fence the residents are not supposed to cross and hunts game with her friend Gail and then they trade their kills at the black market. They are still poor and hungry, however.

Once a year two tributes, a boy and a girl, (kids aged 12-18) from each district are chosen to participate in the Hunger Games where they must fight to the death and only one victor emerges. This is the Capital’s way of punishing the districts for the uprising. This year Catness’s 12 year old sister is chosen and Catness volunteers to take her place. The boy chosen from district 12 is Peter, the bakers’ son. The rest of the story consists of Catness’s and Peter’s preparations at the Capital and then the Hunger Games themselves. The meat of the book is the portrayal of the Hunger Games and how each of the 24 tributes fared.

The story is one of survival, kill or be killed, but it is also a little about rebellion against an unjust Capital. There is also Catness’s conflicting emotions about Gail who she left at home and Peter who professes a love for her that captures the imaginations of the Capital and the people from all of the districts. Catness shows extraordinary bravery as well as tremendous skill with the bow and arrow. As the book is being turned into a movie out in March, it will be interesting to see how Hollywood depicts the story. I can definitely see why the book has been so popular and I’ve heard from many people that it is a must read. I would agree; it was a whole lot of fun.

I rarely ever re-read books, but maybe I should after 15 or more years have gone by. The last time I read Firestarter was when I was in high school and reading it again now was like reading it for the first time; I forgot so much of it. Back in high school I was on a huge Stephen King kick and read everything of his I could get my hands on. I still enjoy his novels, but I have widened my reading habits to many other authors. Now I was reading this on the iPhone and the iPad in iBooks.

In college Andy McGee wanted to make some extra cash so he took part in a psychological drug experiment headed up by one of the professors in the Psychology department named Wanless. Another student who decided she was going to make some extra money was Vicky who would later marry Andy. The experimental drug was called Lot-Six and it had some horrifying effects with some of the students. With Andy, it gave him the power to “push” people. He could use his brain to push someone into doing something that he wanted them to do. However, any push would be followed by a debilitating headache. Vicky got a minor power of being able to close a refrigerator door from across the room, but that was the extent of the drug on her. Who it really affected was Charlie, their daughter. Charlie had pyrokinesis or the ability to start fires just by thinking about it. Whenever she got upset something would light up. The parents kept fire extinguishers all over the house when she was a baby. They eventually scared her enough into not using the power kind of like toilet-training a toddler.

However, the government agency known as “The Shop” that did the experiment are now after the family, and in particular Charlie. Now we have a good guys (Andy and Charlie) on the run and eventually fighting the bad guys (The Shop) story. After eluding the Shop guys for only so long there is a confrontation at the Manders farm and Charlie really shows what she can do. Flames go out in every direction, the cars explode, the chickens at the farm go up like popcorn and several people get burned alive. From there Andy and Charlie head to Vermont but the Shop agents get smarter too and take Charlie out with a tranquilizer dart from a long distance. From there Andy and Charlie are captured and taken to the Shop compound in Virginia. The rest of the book details the tests that go on there and the eventual plan of release.

I thought this was a fun book as most Stephen King books are plus it was a very quick read. Some things are a little dated as this book was written in 1980, but the story still holds up.

I have read two of Gaiman’s young adult novels, Coraline and The Graveyard Book, but I had not read any of his adult novels until this one. American Gods has been getting some press lately because of its 10 year anniversary and a brand new dramatized audio book to celebrate it. However, I chose to read the paper edition I bought at Half Price Books.

At the beginning of the story, the main character Shadow is close to being released from prison. Unbeknownst to him, his parole date gets moved up and he is flying home to be with his wife Laura. While on the plane he meets a strange man named Wednesday who offers him a job, tells him that Laura just died in a car accident with the man Shadow was supposed to be working for when he was released from prison. Shadow now basically has no choice but to work for Wednesday.

Then some really strange things begin to happen. Wednesday takes Shadow to a diner where he meets a tall, drunk Leprechaun who pulls a gold coin out of the air and gives it to Shadow (one of Shadow’s hobbies is coin tricks). The Leprechaun and Shadow also get into a fight so that Wednesday can judge Shadow’s worth. When Shadow reaches his destination, he attends Laura’s funeral and throws the gold coin into the grave. That night Laura visits Shadow in his motel room with dirt under her fingers and smelling of rotten flesh. Laura ends up making several appearances to Shadow through out the course of the book and even has a role to play in the climax of the story.

Shadow takes Wednesday’s job offer which means driving him and doing other odd jobs for him. They begin heading for House on the Rock in North Dakota, a seedy tourist roadside attraction where they are supposed to meet some people. Once there, there is a very memorable scene of a carousel spinning around into another world. It is there that it hits home for Shadow who these people really are, old-world gods. Wednesday is Odin and there is also Anansi, the spider, Czernobog, an Eastern European god kind of like Thor with a sledgehammer and they meet Mr. Ibis and Jacquel later. Wednesday is trying to get all of these gods together in order to prepare for a battle between the old gods and the new gods (modern society, computers, Internet) represented by Mr. World, Mr. Town, and others who are doggedly on their tail throughout the book. It is explained better in the book, I’m trying to not give too much away.

Scattered throughout the book are small chapters entitled “Coming to America”. These were about settlers coming from the old world to the Americas or in one case slaves stuck in a tight ship hold coming from Africa. Another one is about an Arab man who has been in America a week and tries to sell little doo-dads but won’t get anyone to talk to him. He gets in a cab and at one point at a stop, he thinks the driver has fallen asleep. He brushes his hand against the driver accidentally knocking off his sunglasses discovering that the driver is a Jinn or Arab genie. The stories common to all of these little side chapters are that the old-world gods somehow made it to America.

I thought this novel was interesting and definitely a different take on American spirituality including the Native American gods and the old Pagan European gods but excluding the Christian God or Jesus who weren’t mentioned at all. I don’t know if I would call it a page-turner. I didn’t get so bored with it I wanted to quit, but also it did take me several months to read it because I could only read a few pages at a time. It was good which is about where I would leave it.

Since both of these are really short novellas and are included in the same book, I’m going to review both in this posting. The Day of the Locust takes place in Hollywood during the 1930′s where the main character Tod Hackett is a set and costume designer. Over the course of the novella, he falls in love with Faye Greener, an aspiring actress who lives in his apartment building with her father Harry Greener. Harry was a former vaudeville clown who now sells polish door to door and is also kind of sickly. Faye Greener has a lot of suitors though including Earle, a cowboy, and Homer Simpson. Homer was from the MidWest and caught a cold and later pneumonia and his doctor told him he should move out to California to get some rest. However, Homer doesn’t do much but sit on his patio and watch a lizard. He is also a bit depressed and cries himself to sleep. The more colorful character in this story is Earle Shoop. He came to Hollywood to work in Westerns, but he hangs out with a couple of Mexicans who camp out in the hills and take part in cock fights. There is a very memorable scene toward the end of the book where Earle and the Mexicans are living in Faye’s garage and Tod brings a friend over to watch a cock fight. West describes in detail how they tie these razor blades to the rooster’s wings and the dominant rooster will stick those blades into the breast of its opposition. It is a pretty gruesome scene. The comic relief in this scene is a dwarf who is also with them and is either trying to pick fights with the bigger guys or is placing bets on the roosters. That part of the book was absolutely nuts!

The story is mainly about Tod trying to win Faye, but how he ends up just making friends with and hanging out with her other suitors. Faye apparently just sees Tod as a friend. The title comes into play at the very end of the book where Tod gets caught in a mob of the poor and downtrodden outside a big movie premiere in Hollywood. It was an interesting story if only for the crazy characters that Tod finds himself getting mixed up in.

Whereas The Day of the Locust takes place on the west coast and was written much later when Nathaniel West lived in Hollywood, Miss Lonelyhearts takes place in New York City and was the second book West published. Again the characters come from a class of people who are the downtrodden. Miss Lonelyhearts is actually a man who writes an advice column for the newspaper. He gets the most depressing letters from people. Examples include a woman who is in so much pain with her kidneys but her husband keeps making her pregnant with 7 children in 12 years or a letter from a sixteen year old girl born without a nose who wants a boyfriend but nobody will even look at her because of her condition. Miss Lonelyhearts doesn’t know how to answer all of the pitiable pleas for help. His boss makes a lot of Christ jokes at him. The turning point in the novel is when Miss Lonelyhearts gets a letter from the wife of a crippled man who is not getting her needs satisfied and Miss Lonelyhearts actually pays her a visit and they end up having an affair. This sets the ball rolling for the tragic outcome of the story. Miss Lonelyhearts doesn’t really help anyone from what I gathered; he just writes a column invoking Christ as the answer. He, himself, wanders throughout the story in his own despair even though his girlfriend tries to take him away from it all by driving him out to her farmland in Connecticut. When he returns, it is just back to the letters.

If I were to pick a favorite out of the two novellas in this collection, it would probably be The Day of the Locust due primarily to the unforgettable cock fighting scene and the cast of crazy characters. Miss Lonelyhearts was interesting, especially the letters West includes in the story, but was ultimately too much wrapped in despair. I gave the whole collection 3 stars in GoodReads

In this sequel to Daemon, Suarez continues where the last one left off. Matthew Sobol’s darknet has taken off with the populous . The darknet is a virtual plane only visible through sunglass Heads up Displays or HUDS. People are building sustainable communities in the darknet and those who are a switched on are basically rebuilding life. At the end of Daemon we had the character of Loki Stormbringer, a miscreant in real life, who becomes very powerful in the darknet who can summon automated attack vehicles and razorbacks (autonomous motorcycles with sharp rotating swords to dismember enemies) in order to defend the darknet. He is in an all out war with the Major, who is against the darknet, who commandeers a corporatized army to take out the daemon and the darknet with it. He can spin the news saying that armed gangs are killing everybody in the Midwest United States when really it is his army that is taking out the darknet one faction and one city at a time. While Loki represents pure evil and has a low reputation score on the darknet side to prove it, The Major represents evil on the civilian or non-connected world side of things.

Working to set things right are the heros of the story, Pete Sebeck (AKA The Unnamed One which is his computer world call out)and Laney (Chunky Monkey), his partner in the darknet are on a quest initiated by the avatar of Matthew Sobol to find the Cloud Gate. Not only does Sebeck have to go on this quest, he also undergoes a character arc from being very resistant to Sobol and the darknet to actually embracing it as a good thing. Another good guy in this story is Jon Ross (AKA Rahk) who wants to bring down Loki and The Major and make the darknet a community everyone can live and work in. He is still in love with Dr. Natalie Phillips who refuses to join the darknet but works for the National Security Agency trying to end the Daemon.

One of the other interesting side plots in this story is the character of Hank Fossen. He is a farmer in Greeley, Iowa. While out on his tractor he sees some black SUVs on his land. All the farmers in the area have been planting genetically altered corn from this company. Apparently this company wants to take his land and he’s not having it. They are going to sue him for this land he’s on. Meanwhile Hank’s daughter has joined the darknet and though the power of the Daemon manage to get this suit dropped. The daughter gets Hank to join the darknet and teaches him how using this virtual infrastructure he can change his land into farming food that is organic and edible. It’s an interesting commentary on the corporatization of farming and making it difficult for the small farmer to survive growing seed that is not owned by some company or is genetically altered.

I believe I said this in the Daemon review, but if you like computers, video games or technology in general and how it is changing or affecting society you will get a big kick out of these books. They are very fun to read and are real page turners as well. I also heard that Suarez may be releasing a new book in this series called Darknet which I can’t wait to check out.

I am very excited for the movie version of this to come out which should be at the end of April. I’ve had this book on my shelf for a while but as soon as I saw the trailer for the movie I knew I had to read it before the movie came out. The book is told from the point of view of Jacob Jankowski who at the beginning of the book wants to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a veterinarian. He is taking his finals at Cornell and becomes so nervous that he leaves the testing room. While he is wandering about in the night a train comes passing by. He hops the train and it completely changes the course of his life.

It turns out the train he hopped belongs to the Benzini Brothers Circus. A couple of workers take him in and finally talk Uncle Al the owner and ringleader of the circus to give Jacob a job as the circus veterinarian. Jacob is introduced to August who is in charge of the animals including 6 horses that his wife Marlena performs on in the circus, lions, tigers, and later an elephant named Rosie who is very funny and is apparently based on several circus elephants Gruen came across in her research for the book. Jacob soon gets closer to August and Marlena and eventually falls in love with Marlena but I won’t reveal how that goes.

One of the interesting facets of the book is how it goes back and forth between Jacob as an old man in a nursing home and Jacob as a young man with the Benzini Brothers circus. Jacob as an old man is crotchety, doesn’t get along with the other residents, but is very excited for the circus coming to town and is waiting for his family members to get to the home so that they can take him to the circus. It is kind of neat following these two stories of different times in Jacob’s life.

The story of life in the circus itself during the Great Depression was fascinating as well. Uncle Al and August weren’t very nice men but I won’t spoil any of that since they make up the meat of the story. It was interesting the segregation between the circus workers and roustabouts and the performers. They ate at different tables, slept in different train cars and the workers were even denied pay when the circus wasn’t making enough while the performers always got paid. What was also interesting and kind of scary was the process of red lighting someone. Basically if Uncle Al didn’t want someone he would have his security throw them off of the moving train. It was technically illegal and Al would often have to talk to the railroad authorities, but it still happened from time to time and I bet stuff like that really did happen in actuality.

Overall I would say this was a very enjoyable book. It was interesting to read about circus life during this time in American history and how these small train circuses compared themselves to the granddaddy of them all Ringling Brothers. I would highly recommend this book.

This was a fantastic book recommended to me by one of the owners of this blog, Jen.  Jen interviewed me in November for her podcast and mentioned this book. I watched the trailer and immediately bought the ebook on my iPhone.  This book could easily be broken down into two halves.  The first half involves a five year old boy named Jack and his mom kept in an 11 foot by 11 foot room by their kidnapper Old Nick.  The second half occurs after an amazing escape from the room and how Jack adapts to the outside world he has never known.  I have to say that the book became immensely fascinating and one that could not be put down at the point of the escape throughout the entire second half.

Besides the interesting concept  and what-if scenario of a 5 year old boy experiencing the world for the first time after being locked in a room since birth, the uniqueness of the book is that Donoghue managed to write the whole thing from Jack’s perspective and in exactly the way a 5 year old would think and talk.  When in Room everything has its place. There is Rug and Wardrobe where he sleeps at night and Bed where Ma sleeps and Meltedy Spoon and even when Old Nick brings him a remote control jeep he calls it Remote and Jeep.  Ma was kidnapped at age 19 and the escape happens when she is 27 so she spent 8 years locked in what amounts to a backyard shed.  I’m not going to reveal any more about the escape because it one of the most exciting scenes in the book.

I do want to talk some about the second half though because I think it was probably my favorite section of the book.  They wind up at a psychiatric clinic to help them make the adjustment to the outside world.  The doctor gives Jack counseling sessions and Jack also gets to meet his grandparents and aunt and uncle for the first time.  There is also a media storm of paparazzi surrounding the amazing story.  What was so interesting to me is that Jack was taught so much in Room about math and counting and reading, but he got into the outside world and he didn’t know how to slide down a slide or that it was wrong to take a book from the bookstore.  He had to slowly acclimate to even going outside for the first time.  I guess what I liked so much about it is that Donoghue wrote in a such a way that I could believe everything Jack was going through.

The other really interesting dynamic in the book was the relationship between Jack and Ma.  Because Jack lived the first 5 years of his life in the same tiny space as his Ma he couldn’t bear to be without her when they got into the outside world.  Jack could force himself to be brave or independent when he had to be such as when Ma was “Gone” on painkillers and during the Great Escape.  But most of the time he stuck to Ma like glue and would not leave her for anything.

The last thing I would like to bring up when talking about this book are all of the references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  There are many passages sprinkled in throughout.  I guess you could interpret that as being parallel to how Outside was so topsy turvy to Jack and how everything was strange and unusual to Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole.  It’s also interesting that the Great Escape was inspired by another piece of classic literature The Count of Monte Cristo. Over all I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.

This was a very hard book to listen to. As a matter of fact I had attempted to listen to it once before and stopped about an hour in.  Last night I finished listening it. It is not a very long book, only 136 pages or 5 hours in the audio version, but the language and situations depicted in it are highly vulgar, but very real.  The novel Push was made into the movie Precious, which in itself was a very hard movie to watch.

This whole story takes place in Harlem, New York in the 1980s. The book is told from the perspective of Clarice “Precious” Jones.  She had her first baby from her father at age 12 and her second baby also from her father at age 16.  Her father had been having sex with her since she was 7 (that she can remember) but there is a line toward the end that the abuse may have started much earlier when she was in diapers.  Not only was she raped by her father but her mother beat her while she was having her first baby on the kitchen floor.  Remember she’s only 12 years old when this happens. It is beyond horrible that this poor girl did not get a normal childhood.  Living with her mother has been an absolute hellish existence.  The first baby is severely mentally retarded and has Down Syndrome.  Her grandmother takes care of little Mongo (short for Mongoloid).  Her second baby Abdul is a healthy baby and Precious is determined to take care of him herself.

The book has redeeming qualities also which started to make it more compelling for me.  Precious never was very good at school. When the book opens she is 16 years old and in the 9th grade and has no idea how to read and write.  She sits in the back of math class.  She is sent to principal’s office and is suspended for being pregnant which she is angry about because it is not her fault.  The principal comes to her house and talks through the intercom at her about an alternative school Reach One Teach One on the 19th floor of the Hotel Theresa.  Precious wants to learn so she enrolls in the program that teaches remedial reading and writing.  There are about 7 girls in this class all, we find out later, with similar horror stories as Precious.  It is taught by a teacher named Blue Rain.  She becomes a mentor to Precious and teaches her the alphabet and how to read and write in a journal every day.  Precious even gets an award from the city for her progress and moves out of her horrible home into a half way house.  There is hope for her until she hears from her mother that her father has died of AIDS and you know where that is headed.

It was a very hard book to listen to, but after awhile it became so compelling that I wanted to finish it. Sapphire (AKA Ramona Lofton) is a very poetic writer, at times making the book sound like Slam Poetry, and the book is so steeped in realism that you are sure stories like this really happen to people, even as horrible as it may seem.  There is also some commentary about welfare, unemployment, and other issues related to poverty that make this an interesting book as well.  Overall I ended up liking it for the issues it brought up and that little bit of hope that Precious got at the end.