Precious: A True Story by Precious Williams

 

Product Description

'Where are you from?' is a question I always find hard to answer. 1971: an ad in Nursery World. 'Private foster parents required for a three-month-old baby' - me. The lucky applicants are a 57-year-old white woman and her daughter, who love babies, especially black babies. My mother arrives, a haughty Nigerian woman in a convertible with a moses basket on the seat beside her, setting the net curtains in this all-white council estate twitching. And though the whole place makes my privileged mother's skin crawl, she returns to London with an empty basket beside her, choosing this home for me because, unusually for the estate, my foster mother talks proper, and I'll need a posh white accent for the bright future I have ahead of me. I'll cling on to that idea - that I've a bright future ahead of me - even though there's nothing in my upbringing to warrant it. Even though my mother's love consists of long absences, confusing behaviour and dauntingly high expectations. Even though my foster mother's love is overwhelming and suffocating. Even though I seem to be a magnet for abusive sexual attention from men I barely know. Even though the authorities have no idea where to put me or where I belong, and nor, really, do I. And even when I fall pregnant at eighteen and find myself back in the rural town I'd tried to escape from, with a tiny baby dependent on me, I still think the future's out there. I'll find it, whatever it takes. "Precious" is the story of growing up black in a white community, of struggling to find an identity that fits amid conflicting messages, of deciphering a childhood full of secrets and dysfunction. Painfully honest, swerving from farce to tragedy, "Precious" has a spirit that refuses to be crushed. 

Paperback, 256 pages

Published August 1st 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC  

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I loved this book and read it very quickly, as I was so interested in what happened to this little girl. It is a very raw and honest memoir of Precious life. I went through a world wind of emotions reading this, I was crying,happy and angry at some parts. This book is very well written and to the point. Precious is an inspirational lady and I thank her for sharing her story with us. The only thing for me is I would of liked to have found out more, like did she see her mother again?, Her sister and baby? Did she ever go back to Africa to see her family?. I was left with so many unanswered questions.

I would definitely recommend this book.

Carly :)