Bone Black: Memories Of Girlhood

Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood

From Library JournalHooks (Killing Rage, LJ 7/95), who teaches English at City College in New York, reveals her family secrets and her struggle to belong in this "unconventional" memoir of girlhood. Moving from the first to the third person in beautifully rendered short chapters quite unlike her scholarly work, hooks speaks of her mother's unhappy, abusive marriage; her siblings' disdain for her; her spiritual upbringing; and her discovery of sexuality. She grew up poor in the rural South, where she and her five sisters and brother came face to face with racism when they were forced to attend a white school in the name of integration. Hooks became interested in books at an early age, sometimes sneaking to read her father's pornographic materials, but her mother disapproved of her reading so much. Nevertheless, her reading tastes grew, from books on sex to books by George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte to popular romances, which gave her the sense of "escape, release, a feeling of satisfaction, a belief in the possibility of self-recovery," and the urge to be a writer herself. A sad tale of childhood memories but a winner; highly recommended.-?Ann Burns, "Library Journal"Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.A feminist thinker and author writes not a chronological narrative of her life but a series of impressions as the young girl that she was became aware of segregation, civil rights, family ties, spirituality, and her own sexuality. 30,000 first printing.Ergodebooks.com Reviewbell hooks, who teaches English at New York's City College, is well-known as an abrasive, take-no-prisoners feminist cultural critic. In this moving memoir of her childhood she explains the roots of her forceful and rigorous attitude to life and literature. She grew up in a poor Southern black family, an heir to poverty and racism, surrounded by people too wrapped up in their own struggles to offer much help to her. She writes here of her mother's suffering in an abusive marriage, of her siblings' rejection of her for being "different," of her own painful discovery of sexuality, and of how she found escape through books.From Publishers WeeklyJust as hooks, author of several books on issues of race and sex (Killing Rage, etc.) has idiosyncratically taken a lower-case name, her memoir, written in imagistic three-page segments, takes an unconventional approach. Aiming "to conjure a rich magical world of southern black culture," she avoids conventional signifiers like place names and dates and even shifts between a first-person and a third-person voice, referring to herself as "she." Add such techniques to simple, present-tense syntax, and the results can sound precious at times. Still, hooks is right to declare that "[n]ot enough is known about the experience of black girls in our society," so her effort deserves close reading. She struggles with a toy Barbie, preferring a brown doll. She finds sustenance in a rich black community?though one grandmother hates dark skin. She turns to religion and she loves the library. Her mother and older sister treat her menarche with more scorn than sympathy, but she discovers on her own the private pleasure of sexuality. There are scenes of the growing young woman learning about jazz, developing a crush, seeing her parents fight, finding one white teacher who seems unafraid of black kids. In the end, this book leaves us with a familiar but not unsatisfying image, that of a sensitive youth finding in books deliverance from "the wilderness of spirit I am living in."Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.From School Library JournalYA. This treasure box of memories presents 61 snapshot vignettes of two-to-three pages in length of the author growing up in a southern town as an African-American rebel in a family of six girls and one boy. Memories flow chronologically and reveal hooks's growing awareness of the world around her and her role in it. She fits these experiences, dreams,