Push (Novel)

Push, a novel by Sapphire is a story about a young African American girl struggling through a rough life. The book was published by Vintage on April 29, 1997 and is being adapted into a movie, Precious late November 2009.

Claireece Precious Jones endures unimaginable hardships in her young life. Abused by her mother, raped by her father, she grows up [[poor, angry, illiterate, fat, unloved and generally unnoticed. So what better way to learn about her than through her own, halting dialect. That is the device deployed in the first novel by poet and singer Sapphire. "Sometimes I wish I was not alive," Precious says. "But I don't know how to die. Ain't no plug to pull out. 'N no matter how bad I feel my heart don't stop beating and my eyes open in the morning." An intense story of adversity and the mechanisms to cope with it.http://www.amazon.ca/Push-Novel-Sapphire/dp/0679766758

Like a starker, black urban version of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, Push is the painfully graphic story of a battered child named Precious Jones, who bears her father's babies first at 12 and again at 16. Suffering abuse by both parents and serving as a virtual slave to her apartment-bound, welfare-dependent mother, Precious lives in hopeless isolation in Harlem, until she enters an alternative school where she meets other troubled girls and, cheered on by a devoted teacher, learns to write. - Entertainment Weeklyhttp://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,293209,00.html