Push by Sapphire [book]

Push by Sapphire [book]

New York : Vintage Contemporaries/Vintage Books, 1997, c1996
139, [38] p. ; 21 cm
ISBN: 9780679766759

Plot Summary:
Claireece Jones (also known as Precious) walks through life going unnoticed. She is overweight, quiet, abused by her mother and father, alone, poor, uneducated, and still a very young soul. Precious writes about her struggles in school, her rape by her father, and the physical, and mental abuse from her mother in entries to speak out about her life and the injustices in it. Precious already has one child from her father when the reader is introduced to her and she is failing at school and struggling to make ends meet. When it becomes known that she is pregnant, she is taken out of school and meets a counselor named Blu Rain that introduces her to writing and expressing herself through art. Precious details the constant battle between her and her mother over jealousy of her father's affection, and the turmoil of having no support and in living in fear of a father that hurts her, in which she is defenseless.
Towards the end of the book Precious gives birth to her second child by her father and also learns that she is HIV positive. She struggles to keep both of her children, get away from her mother, and begins to speak about her life to others that need to hear her story. Precious shows determination and will power in the fight to better her life and tell the world about her life.

Critical Evaluation:
The book can be difficult to read both because of the dialect that Precious uses and because of the shocking rape scenes from her father and abuse scenes from her mother. The tone of the book is so innocent of the harms that this sixteen year old girl has experienced, but so adult in the fact that she speaks of them so honestly. It is a short book written from the perspective of Precious and it does not hold back in the description of her life and its misery to date. I like the idea that she is writing the book to tell her life story and it is written as if someone who lived in a bad neighborhood with a bad education was learning to write, but it made it difficult to understand at times. I could look at it as poetic in that respect, but I think that some people would put the book down when they saw the dialect that it is written in.

Reader's Annotation:
Claireece "Precious" is an abused, overweight sixteen year old girl that is pregnant with her second child from her father when a counselor takes special interest and teaches her how to speak up for herself.

Websites to look Into:
http://aalbc.com/authors/sapphire.htm
http://www.weareallprecious.com/

The Author:
Sapphire's real name is Ramona Lofton, and she only wrote the first 100 pages of Push before agencies auctioned for the rights to publish her and finish the book.

Similar Books:
"The Kid" by Sapphire

Booktalking Ideas:
Showing parts of the movie
Discussing the book in terms of family abuse and artistic outlets

Genre:
Multicultural/ Fiction/ Adult Crossovers

Interest Age:
17 + 

Challenge Issues:
Sexuality & Incest
This book can be graphic, deals with incest and eventually AIDS. I think that to combat this I would say that the book discusses a young woman in a bad family home that eventually speaks out for herself and takes control of her own life. The book does have troublesome topics, but they can be real and this book helps people to see that they can overcome obstacles and come up from bad situations in life.

Why this Book?
I chose this book because I thought it was very interestingly written and was different from other books that I have read. I think that it is scary in the way that it depicts a girl with no support from her family and the novel does end positively for the main character. I think that it is important to have this type of book in a collection for a way to present a different point of view.