The Kid [Paperback]

The Kid was a tough read. J.J.'s story is moving, revolting, sad, inspiring, deplorable. But I was hooked. I couldn't look away however rough it got. I felt for this kid. The author tells it like it is - and it's an outrage. J.J., a smart nine-year-old orphan and daydreamer with a vivid imagination, has to endure what any sane person would find unendurable, and it begins the day after his mother's funeral when he's thrown into a dysfunctional system of social services. I don't take J.J.'s story as necessarily a strike against Harlem (s*** also happens in well-manicured suburbs) so much as a strike against organizations responsible for the care of orphans.

J.J. encounters his first bully at a foster home and it doesn't end well. He is consigned to being bullied and abused until age and size make them less likely. But as he grows older he answers in kind, becoming a bully and abuser himself. Surprised? Hell doesn't produce saints. People can transcend their environments but not so frequently that we can take comfort in high-minded hopes for the future.

Tough reading but must reading.

I have a great admiration for Sapphire's "Push." It's a purposefully difficult, fascinating voyage into the dire life of young woman attempting to cope with a hateful world. That book challenges you with its writing, insisting you pay full attention and asking you to draw your own conclusions about certain passages or scenes.

Not only is "The Kid" a sickening reversal of the underlying messages contained in "Push," but it basically spits in the face of those who loved the first novel. What follows contains light spoilers, but nothing you wouldn't find in your favorite newspaper or magazine review.

Okay, so are we alone now? Good. Here's the deal. So Precious dies of AIDS and her son is left to suffer much the same fate his mother does. He's repeatedly raped, beaten and treated horrendously by Catholic brothers, his great grandmother and other boys. Oh, and then he turns into a psychotic monster who ALSO rapes and beats women and children.

Let's start with what happened to Precious and how this novel negates everything that made "Push" special. Okay, I get it, not every story gets a Hollywood happy ending, and that's fine. If Precious truly had to die because the story called for it and the death "meant" something to both readers and the characters in the novel, then so be it. But here she's eliminated quickly without anything near the tribute her character deserved. And why? So her own child, the boy she fought so long and hard in "Push" to save from this life, could be abandoned to that same life. You know, I could even buy that if it was done well and the story became something close to redemption. But here the Kid of the title (Abdul) becomes a monster and becomes the kind of man that, in another world, might have been one of the agressors that abused Precious. So, in essence, EVERYTHING Precious worked for in "Push," from her writings to her child, have been for naught. Here, that book's legacy has been stomped upon. Spit upon. Trounced. It's sickening, it really is.

If she really wanted to just kill off Precious this bluntly, why didn't Sapphire do it at the end of "Push"? If that's all her life really meant, that is. Or why couldn't Sapphire have simply started fresh and had a different, new character be the mother here? Why? Perhaps because of the shock value? Because this was the only way she figured she could sell some books? Or perhaps it was the only way she could sell this book, considering how inane and disgusting the rest of the content was? I can't fathom another reason, based in emotion, for her to do it.

So we are left with Abdul to go through much of the same 'ole stuff we read about before. But, instead of watching a character learn to fight back and protect herself, we watch a young man's slide into evil...or slow embrace of evil, whichever you prefer. Abdul becomes a monster that metaphorically rapes his mother's legacy by physically raping others. There are long, long (LONG!) passages of Abdul fantasizing about sexual assault and the descriptions of what he does or thinks about doing had me queazy. There's no underlying hope here, even after Sapphire introduces dancing as a way for him to apply himself (a fourth-rate rip-off of what she did with Precious' writing in "Push), and the odd thing is that, even with all the sickness in his mind, Abdul remains a sad, one-dimensional cardboard cut-out of a character we can't even hate because he's so paper-thin. You'd think if Sapphire would have applied so much time and effort (and fully knowing she would alienate her fans) into crafting this evil man as the protagonist of her book, she would have tried to make him the least bit interesting, no?

It's not even understandable half the time. The stream-of-consciousness writing that challenged the reader in "Push" seems lazy and cloying here, as if Sapphire just wrote whatever she felt like and didn't care enough to shape it into a cohesive narrative.

So what will you get out of this experience if you purchase "The Kid"? Well, for one you'll never be able to enjoy rereading "Push" again. You won't be able to respect the author again. You'll probably put it down halfway through because of all the fantasies of rape and molestation. It's not a good book on any level, from the writing to the character to the message.

It's just...ugly.

The beginning of "The Kid" was reminiscent of "Push"-- a child in Harlem has the odds stacked against him. Everything that can possibly go wrong does, and does so in a horribly graphic way.

"Push," however, was better constructed. Sapphire's style tends to be tangential. She intentionally incorporates moments when you're not entirely sure of who's speaking and whether that character is functioning in a real world situation or is lost in fantasy. In "Push," you eventually figure it all out. The author paints a clear picture, albeit graphic and soul-crushing.

"The Kid" left me feeling lost. Somewhere within the first hundred pages, the plot arc deteriorates as Abdul loses his grip on reality. Fantasy intermingles with reality far too often, and one problem spirals tangentially into the next. I understand that Sapphire has done this intentionally as a stylistic choice and a means of expressing Abdul's mental state, but after 374 pages, I expected SOME resolution. Style clearly overshadowed plot and content. And, while "Push" ended with some tiny glints of hopefulness and positivity, "The Kid" simply ends in a web of confusion.

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