Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (Bone Black)

Rating:
Summary: A prose experiment that suceeds in providing insight
Review: At first, I found the uniformly sized (3-page) chunks of invoking with stripped-down sentences in bell hook's Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood somewhat affectless and very structurally arbitrary. Hemingway sprang to mind, but then I thought of Stein's syntax (and the role she claimed in forming Hemingway's style). Hooks's repetitions are more subtle, and perhaps her prose is, too, because eventually I found it compelling. The pain of being different while young and vulnerable came through the chilly prose.

What she describes of female complicity in male privilege is particularly frightening and compelling. She experienced little female solidarity, being rejected by her five sisters and never able to please her mother (who agreed with her father that her spirit needed to be broken).

Rating:
Summary: you know her work, now get to know the author
Review: I couldn't stop turning the pages of this brutally honest tale of a black, southern, woman who grows up knowing that she is different. And therefore, her life will be different.

This little book gives an intimate look, at the writer some say is the most prolific writer on race, gender and class. hooks, uses words extremely cautiously whick makes this piece on you simply can't put down.

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Rating:
Summary: GREAT BOOK, GREAT AUTHOR
Review: This book is especially for intelligent black females, but is for all who want to understand the pains of growing up being a poor black female.