Anna:
I’m excited to share my first 5 star read of the year! T Kira Madden’s memoir is a heartbreaking and beautiful account of growing up in Boca Raton—or Rat’s Mouth— of Florida. It’s so raw and emotional, and not to mention lyrically written, that it’s both hard to read yet impossible to put down. My inability to stop reading, despite the contestant pretense of bleak topics, is something I love about Madden’s writing. She truly has a talent in making the bad beautiful in her writing without diminishing the severity and impact of the bad.
This book comes with a trigger warning for just about everything. A lot of this book deals with drug abuse, alcohol abuse, physical abuse, child pornography and sexual abuse, and basically every kind of abuse you can think of.
Something I really like about this memoir is the cyclical nature of it, which is something I find quite annoying in some memoirs, but that isn’t the case here. Madden never “harps” on certain details or asks the reader to feel bad for her in any way. It is her blunt and rich writing that earned my sympathy and trust.
Something else that stood out to me is Madden’s tremendous ability to forgive, especially in the case of her family and her parents. This lack of anger and blame, despite the difficulties she has experienced, is what has resonated with me the most since finishing this memoir.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls will be published March 5, 2019 in the U.S. I can’t wait for more people to read this!
VERDICT: 5 out of 5 books
takes two to book review 