Thoughts and Ideas on Saphire's "Push"

The book entitled "Push", written by Sapphire, is one of the most shocking books that I have ever read. The story revolves around the life of one Precious Jones. Her life is scarred with rape, molestation, pregnancy, poverty, the HIV virus, illiteracy, and countless other instances which could be classified as unfortunate. My initial reaction to this novel was that I couldn't believe that all of these bad things can happen to one person. It seemed that as the text progressed, we found out more troubling details of Precious' life. At the begging in it was tough to fully comprehend what was being said, as Precious' writing included allot of misspelled words, unnecessary words, repetitiveness, and often times words used in an incorrect tense. However, once I became accustomed to all of the imperfections, they became less visible and allowed for me to fully engage in the text. Overall, this was a good book, not because of the severity of misfortune, actually making me sad, but that it was so blunt that it was actually very interesting and made me want to read more.

A theme that really strung a cord with me throughout this story was the idea of perseverance. Precious faced more hardships and misfortunes in 16 years of her life than 20 people deserved to fell in their entire lives. It seemed that no matter what she did, things just kept getting worse. Just to put this into perspective, she was raped throughout her early childhood by her father, beginning in at the time when she was still in diapers. She then had a child, from her father, that had down syndrome. That, in itself is unbelievable. However, even though her life was hard, she ended up doing the best that she could do for a person who had been through so much and wasn't ...

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...ery surprising to me, later in the novel, when Precious says that she is surprised that Mrs. Rain was homosexual. This is, obviously due to a lack of education on that particular subject.

There is a great saying that the apple never falls to far away from the tree. This is true when, towards the end of the novel, Precious' mother refuses to take an HIV test because she already knows that she doesn't have the virus. She claims that she "didn't do it like no faggots" meaning that she believed that only gay men could catch the virus. The lack of education in this inner-city community has led to the generation of the Jones family to have many issues. These issues could have been prevented if there were more awareness. I know that this is just a novel, however, I feel that many of these problems are real and this book could serve to inspire many to make a change.