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Thank goodness Antwone Fisher's story has a happy ending--otherwise, his searing memoir would be nearly unbearable to read. His father was killed by a gunshot blast shortly before he was born in 1959; his 17-year-old mother gave him up for foster care. Unfortunately for Antwone, his foster mother was as successful at browbeating and demeaning her many wards as she was at lying to the Chi... More

Thank goodness Antwone Fisher's story has a happy ending--otherwise, his searing memoir would be nearly unbearable to read. His father was killed by a gunshot blast shortly before he was born in 1959; his 17-year-old mother gave him up for foster care. Unfortunately for Antwone, his foster mother was as successful at browbeating and demeaning her many wards as she was at lying to the Child Welfare authorities. His working-class African American neighborhood in Cleveland became purgatory for a sensitive, intelligent boy who quickly turned into a withdrawn underperformer at school. In Fisher's blow-by-blow account of his childhood, his sexual abuse at the hands of a female neighbor is hardly more horrifying than his foster mother's relentless cruelty--especially because respectable, churchgoing Mrs. Pickett justifies it all as due to the boy's wicked faults. Readers will be relieved when she dumps 15-year-old Antwone back at the Child Welfare office, even though he will endure homelessness and a scary spell of criminal employment, before an 11-year stint in the Navy provides him with a way forward. Grim though his tale is, Fisher displays throughout it the grit and stubborn integrity that kept him sane. He musters up some understanding (not forgiveness) for the dreadful Mrs. Pickett, and his eventual meeting with his burned-out mother is painfully poignant. He certainly deserves the beautiful wife and cute two-year-old daughter, cooking pancakes for him in the book's closing and redemptive scene. --Wendy Smith

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