Rescuing Trafficked Girls
A Review of Rachel Lloyd's Gilrs Like Us By Suzanne LaFetra
Enter Danielle, in a slick black ponytail and pink sweat pants. She's a lot like any other 11-year-old girl in the America, "except for one critical difference,” writes Rachel Lloyd. “Over the last year of her life, she's been trafficked up and down the East Coast by a 29-year-old pimp and sold nightly on Craigslist to adult men who ignore her dimples and her baby fat and purchase her for sex."
Lloyd works daily (and nightly) rescuing trafficked girls from a fate she herself suffered. Today she runs a nonprofit organization in New York, and her new book, Girls Like Us isn't just a brow-furrowing collection of grim statistics. Lloyd’s memoir of commercial sexual exploitation and her climb out of harm's way is scary and compelling; she manages to keep you turning pages thanks to her candid truth telling and witty voice (“Must they use a graphic of stilettos when introducing me?”)
Lloyd initiates the reader into the world of trafficking (guerilla pimps, sneaker pimps, subway pimps,) and the psychology of why girls fall into the vicious spiral of exploitation. She recalls a list a girl in her program made: He told me he was my daddy—plus. He takes me on trips—plus. He makes me have sex with other men—minus. He beat me with an extension cord—minus. He told me he loved me--plus plus plus.
Above all, Lloyd hammers home the fact that cultural bias twists sexual trafficking into a blame-the-victim notion of “teen prostitution,” which garners far less sympathy. She quotes a reporter: “There are certain rules in the missing persons game. Don’t be a boy, don’t be working class, don’t be black.” In all of Lloyd’s work with sexually exploited youth (who are largely poor and non-white) she has never once seen a case that got an Amber Alert.
Lloyd’s clarion call is that under-aged sex trafficking is thriving in America. Lloyd admits it's tough to wrap our heads around the fact that this is happening under Uncle Sam's watchful eye. It's easier, she writes "to imagine a Danielle on the streets of Calcutta… than to imagine her waiting for a man on the bright floral polyester bedspread at some motel in Virginia."
Girls Like Us delivers that awful news, wisely, honestly, and in a way that just might make us stand up and do something.
Suzanne LaFetra lives and writes in Berkeley.
Invitation to Introspection
A Review of Women in Poetry
Edited by Carol Smallwood, Colleen S. Harris and Cynthia Brackett-Vincent (foreword by Molly Peacock) and Reviewed by Dr. Christine Redman-Waldeyer
WOMEN ON POETRY: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching is the handbook every poet and teacher of poetry should carry. This book brings awareness to not only the art of poetry but also to the voice of women. It is a tool for both the seasoned poet and for the new poet trying to make their way.
Jenny Sadre-Orafai challenges the poet to enrich their writing life and consider other genres. Others guide us through family and career demands to make time for writing. We are nurtured to find our writing tribe as Kate Chadbourne suggests and given the tools to promote experimental poetry. It's about finding voice, digging into life experience, and as Tracy L. Strauss suggests knowing how to "take the truth of tragedy and turn it into an art form." Doris Lynch instructs how to cast our fishing line into the pool of ideas and begin our poems. Bonnie J. Robinson prompts us to "write a poem of protest; then, write a poem reconciliation."
Women on Poetry is an invitation to introspection and creative self-actualization, inspiring us to be both practitioners and mentors.
Dr. Christine Redman-Waldeyer, founder and editor of Adanna, a journal about women's topics and issues is the author of two books of poetry, Frame by Frame and Gravel, Muse-Pie Press.
.
Hips, Love and Life
A Review of Kim Brittingham's Read My Hips
By B. Lynn Goodwin
For once, the title says it all: READ MY HIPS: How I Learned to Love my Body, Ditch Dieting, and Live Large. As an adolescent, author Kim Brittingham lived through diets, disdain, and disgust. In Read My Hips she shows us who she used to be, how she pulled away from the expectations of others, and what happened as she validated her right to be the size she was.
She didn’t change her body; she changed her attitude. That’s the part of ourselves that we each can control. Her stories make it possible to re-evaluate how we see ourselves even on grim, gloomy days.
Brittingham asks, “…why haven’t more women stopped to ask, ‘Hey, wait a minute—why aren’t thick legs just as beautiful as slim ones? Why can’t I wear thick-soled shoes if I have thick calves? Who says? And why do they get to be right?’” Such questions empower women by helping them to see themselves through new eyes.
Brittingham’s essays are filled with wit and frankness. She tells her truths in the hopes that readers will look at their own. Her experiences give her the authority to write about attitude adjustments and self-acceptance.
Read My Hips should be required reading for anyone from 9 to 90 who’s ever read a scale or looked in a mirror and groaned. Every woman who flagrantly or secretly longs to defy her stomach and her age and be the 2% of Wonder Woman whose bodies defy gravity and repel fat should read this book.
Axis Mundi: In Pursuit of Healing through Place
A Review of Clare Cooper Marcus's Iona Dreaming By Rose Booker
Clare Cooper Marcus’s memoir, Iona Dreaming, is an inspirational account of personal survival and hope, where Marcus shares her battle with cancer. This deepens into a contemplation of the events in her life and her physical, emotional and spiritual healing.
Recently retired with fully-grown adult children, Marcus struggles with more than her cancer. The sudden stillness in her once fast pace life, forces memories from her past into the forefront. Iona becomes a place were she confront these memories and let go.
This work encourages the reader to search out for that one place on earth that allows one to heal. It doesn’t matter if there is nothing more than an inkling that pushes you toward a particular place. As Marcus wrote, “I cannot say why this particular place nurtures me as no other … Yet I know this is my place of healing. That is enough.”
Her work, however, does tend to lean on the pastoral. In this I mean that through demonstrating, first hand, the healing power of place, Marcus is taking part of a literary tradition as old as Middle English. This does not distract from the power of her message. On the contrary it adds to it through placing her work among some of the greatest writers in English history. I only mention it as a warning to those who sneer at anything that has the faintest hint of sentiment – this book may not be for you, at least not until you too find yourself searching for your place of healing.
I recommend this book to those in need of healing, to those with a deep yearning for a place in this big world (an axis mundi), and to those who love memoirs that let you into the author’s life the way a loving friend lets you into their home.
Rose Booker is a current MA Creative Writing student at SFSU and an intern at Writer’s Advice. She’s work for the OFCCP within the Department of Labor, 14 Hills: SFSU’s Literary Magazine, and The Folo: UCB Literary Criticism Magazine.
Thomas Lynley is Alive and Well
A Review of Elizabeth George's This Body of Death By Nanette Cooper-McGuinness
"Elizabeth George is one of a group of female British mystery writers whose books continue to please their readers and tease their brains about "whodunit." Some of the authors give us thrillers and suspense; others the more traditional drawing room mysteries. All have their own niche and a beloved sleuth-protagonist. In the case of This Body of Death, this is Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, an interesting, appealing character (so much so, in fact, that George earned my continuing displeasure when she killed off Lynley’s wife in an earlier book, a brutal and seemingly unnecessary turn of plot that made me hesitate about ever reading her again).
But before I continue, however, here’s fair warning: spoilers ahead.
In her latest offering, George weaves two separate mysteries together: one, the horrible murder of a child from the past, which she bases on a real incident, and the other, a fictional, present-time murder. The first story opens the book as a seemingly unconnected opening frame. When the novel then jumps to the present, we find Lynley’s former team members soldiering on as best they can without him. Nothing and no one can entice the inconsolable Lynley to return until a new superior, Isabelle Ardrey—with whom he develops a bizarre relationship—manages to bring him back to the fold. The two strands of the plot slowly move forward until they merge in a satisfying denouement. "
+++
Opera singer, translator, and writer Nanette Cooper-McGuinness writes fiction, non-fiction, and graphic novels for children and adults. She is the translator of the Geronimo Stilton Graphic Novels (Papercutz). See what she's up to at http://www.nanette.biz or her very occasional blog.
A Review of Wendy Corsi Staub's Hell to Pay By B. Lynn Goodwin
What does it take to survive tragedy and move on? Wendy Corsi Staub continues to explore this question in her 2011 novel, Hell to Pay.
For Lucy Walsh and Jeremy Cavalon marriage and the upcoming birth of the first child seem like the perfect antidote to a tragic past that included loss and miscarriages. They do not know that a shadowy figure from that past escaped from her jail cell in an earthquake and is talking to a phantom priest as she stalks them. Nor does Lucy know a secret from Jeremy’s past that threatens to undo him.
Staub’s latest explores trust and the after-effects of bloodshed, and is filled with suspense, hope, and psychological manipulation. Plot, terror, and empathy for the plight of these people escalates like a freight train fighting the wind to deliver Christmas presents by December 25th. Staub’s suspense works and so do her characters.
New York Times Bestselling Author Wendy Corsi Staub has written over 70 books and creates multiple series at one time. She is a nominee for this year’s Mystery Writers of America Mary Higgins Clark award for Live to Tell, which was the first book in the series.
If you like women in peril and the suspense they face, pick up a copy of Hell to Pay.
.
