It's a memoir by a woman who grew up in an ultra-Christian family that was sooo dysfunctional in so many ways. The mom was only interested in missionaries and actually seems to have hated her kids. The dad would beat the cr** out of them, especially the two adopted boys who were black. Then there was the racism toward the only two black boys in town. And the older black brother was raping the girl on a regular basis. And the mom would feed them horrible, cheap, half-rotten leftover food, all while she drove an Audi and the dad, a doctor, drove a Porsche.
Mostly, the story is about the sister and the younger of the black boys when they were 16 and the family moved further out into the country. The two were the same age and best friends. Eventually, after the dad beat the brother with a 2x4 and broke his arm, they found an excuse to send the brother away to an ultra-religious reform school in the Dominican Republic. The sister is left twisting in the wind, she's sleeping with a guy every night which is E-vil and her dad finally starts beating her up for the slightest infraction, so she runs away and moves in with one of her older (not adopted) brothers. She eventually gets arrested for something minor and instead of having herself declared an emancipated minor, she agrees to go to the reform school where her brother is.
Turns out, at the reform school they humiliate the kids and beat them up, etc etc to bring them closer to Jesus. Very, very scary stuff. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I grew up in Ohio near the Indiana border at about this time and had non-white adopted siblings, but my parents were loving and doing their best and weren't driven by an angry God to beat us up or anything. We were also in a small town, but one with many ethnicities. Race relations were not always pretty (like the timea couple of years after I was out of high school when a redneck decided a good Halloween costume to wear to school would be his KKK robes so he got sent home, then there was a Klan march on the town and skinheads having fistfights. Oh and a kid I used to babysit being arrested for throwing rocks at the KKK. Good boy!), and my biracial sister had trouble fitting in sometimes ("Black people don't have freckles and red hair! And you talk like you're white!")
Fairly disturbing book all around, mostly because no one saw the child abuse either in the family or at the reform school, and no one did anything about it. That, and the parents treated the black brothers like outsiders and like they were inherently evil. Now, why would you adopt someone you had no intention of really helping? Oh, but they were helping by not sparing the rod, that's right.
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3 comments:
Thanks for the review, Phyllis. Sounds like something I couldn't read. Too much outrage roaring up just reading your review! I'd rather have a nice, happy romance or mystery where I know what will happen! :)
But seriously, a book with that much stuff to think about . . . I can't do it. I really do read, watch movies, etc for entertainment and escape. I know these kinds of books are important to many, many people but they are too much for me.
I wouldn't normally have read it, I don't think, but it was chosen for a book group. I almost didn't pick it up again after haflway through.
Now the book for my other book group, I haven't even started because it seems too serious and I'm just not in the mood ;)
There was a lot of hurt in that family. Jerome and David weren't angels, and neither was Julia. I was in their home and I don't remember seeing any rotten food. Her parents weren't evil, despite Julia's words to the contrary.
I was best friends with her older sister in college. I remember her crying over the stuff with the boys. One of them was caught stealing and it just broke her heart. Her parents were so disappointed in him. And Julia--Julia was on a rebellious trip at the time I knew her. Bound and determined to be in trouble, no matter what the cost to the family or herself. Lots of anger there. I visited them home several times and they seemed pretty normal to me. (Had a HUGE crush on her older brother--blonde hair, dreamy blue eyes--what a hunk! *drool*)
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