Review : PUSH

PUSH by Sapphire

Author: Sapphire is the author of American Dreams, a collection of poetry which was cited by Publishers Weekly as “One of the strongest debut collections of the nineties”. Push, her novel, won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association´s First Novelist Award, and, in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award. Push was named by the Village Voice and Time Out New York as one of the top ten books of 1996. Push was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. About her most recent book of poetry Poets and Writers Magazine wrote: “With her soul on the line in each verse, her latest collection, Black Wings & Blind Angels, retains Sapphire´s incendiary power to win hearts and singe minds.”

Sapphire´s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin and Bomb. In February of 2007 Arizona State University presented PUSHing Boundaries, PUSHing Art: A Symposium on the Works of Sapphire. Sapphire´s work has been translated into eleven languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe. Precious, the film adaption of her novel, won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Awards in the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance (2009).

I read the book “PUSH“ by Sapphire. It´s about a girl, called Clairecee Precious Jones, who tells something about her agonizing life.

The story starts when she is 16 years old. At this time she already has a child by her father, who kept raping her for a long time. She was 13 when her first child was born, a girl who has down syndrome. Her name is Little Mongo (because of her illness). But Little Mongo was taken away from her and lives with Precious’ grandmother.

Besides, she was kicked out of school and her mother hates her and treats her badly.
And now, 3 years later, the same things are about to happen again.

Again she´s pregnant. Again by her father. And again she has to leave school.
But this time she will not give away her child when he´s born, she wants to bring him up herself!
And she has decided to go to a new school, called Each One Teach One, an alternative school, where she wants to pass her GED, the equivalent to the high-school certificate, to have some education.

In her new class there are girls having had similar experiences, or even worse, to hers. Precious makes friends with some of them. Her new teacher, Ms Rain, gets to know Precious really closely as time goes by and is like her best friend and confidant in the end. She helps Precious to feel better, pushes her and wants her to know that she´s someone special.

When her second child, a boy, is born, she is 17 years old. She names him Abdul James Louis Jones because this name has a special meaning to her.

A few days later she leaves home with Abdul and moves into “ ½ way house”. She also starts a therapy to cope with all the dreadful things that have happened to her.

By this time she has already lost contact with her mother, up until the time when her mum, who usually never leaves her apartment, comes to “½ way house” to tell her that her father has died.

He had the AIDS virus.

These words change her life. What will now happen to her? And to her children? Are any of them infected, too? And if so, how long will they still be alive?

If you want to know how this story ends, read this gripping book! (:

I would recommend this book because it’s written in a really exciting manner. I could identify well with Precious and understand her feelings and her doubts. Some scenes are quite horrifying  and it´s hard to believe that all this happened to an innocent girl (Sapphire’s novel contains some autobiographical elements). But you can´t stop reading because you always want to know what happens next. There are some very shocking parts that are described in minute detail and imagining these situations made me shudder with disgust, because for me it´s inconceivable how a father could do this to his own daughter. There were also scenes that were very sad and that brought tears to my eyes. But with every sentence and every scene you realize that you can consider yourself lucky that you are not in such an agonizing situation. Reading this book set me thinking and made me realize that I should be satisfied with my life.

The book was not so easy to read because the author uses colloquial language and sometimes you don’t really know what it means, but gradually you get used to it.  The book also contains many swear words, which comes as a shock at first, but in my opinion they make the book authentic because they reflect the situation perfectly well and show Precious’ feelings at a particular moment. Sometimes the action is interrupted and the narrator provides a look back at Precious’ earlier life, and this “switching” is a little bit confusing at first, but after some time you get used to this, too.

In the final analysis, I really recommend this great book, but because of its horrifying content, I would not recommend it to pupils under 16!