Review: Push

Precious Jones is sixteen years old, in the ninth grade and pregnant with her second child.  She has suffered unimaginable abuse and is basically illiterate.  Because of the pregnancy, she is suspended and sent to an alternative school.  She’s offended at first, but alternative school turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to Precious.  That’s not to say that her life is ever easy.

Push by Sapphire is the story of Precious Jones.  It’s written in vernacular, so some of the writing is crude, but you can follow Precious’s progress throughout the book.  Push is gritty, raw, emotional and heartbreaking.  I could hardly stand it when Precious described herself this way:

I big, I talk, I eats, I cooks, I laugh, watch TV, do what my muver say.  But I can see when the picture come back I don’t exist.  Don’t nobody want me.  Don’t nobody need me.  I know who I am.  I know who they say I am – vampire sucking the system’s blood.  Ugly black grease to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for.

I’m not sure that enjoyed is the right word to describe my feelings for this book – I think maybe affected is more appropriate.  Push is well written and disturbing on so many levels.  It is hard to imagine how someone can treat another human being in such a horrible fashion.  The tears just flowed when I read this passage:

I always thought I was someone different on the inside.  That I was just fat and black and ugly to people on the OUTSIDE. And if they could see inside me they would see something lovely and not keep laughing at me, throwing spitballs (shit one time nigger at school just spit on me when I was pregnant) and polly seed shells at me, that Mama and Daddy would recognize me as. . . as, I don’t know, Precious!

I think it would be impossible to read this book and not be moved.  Push is a novel, but I suspect it’s based on a real person or several real people.  I couldn’t help but think of a young girl who was in Vance’s fifth grade class as I read this book.  She was living in a condemned building with her mother’s boyfriend because her mother was in jail.  The other students used to complain because she smelled bad.  I talked to Vance about the importance of being kind to her since she had no one at home who cared about her and I did what I could to help her.  She always gave me a big hug when she saw me, but she was so quiet that it was hard to know if I made any difference.  I’m sad to say that I lost contact with her because we moved.  I just wonder how many children in this country are suffering  that way.

I think Push is an important piece of literature, but be forewarned that it includes language, crude sexual references, sexual abuse and child abuse.  It covers many topics that are difficult and uncomfortable to read about.

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