Precious - Softcover

Sapphire.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099548720 ISBN 13: 9780099548720

Publisher: Random House, 2010

Synopsis

This is the story of Precious Jones, a sixteen year old illiterate black girl who has never been out of Harlem. She is pregnant by her own father for the second time, and kicked out of school when that pregnancy becomes obvious. Placed in an alternative teaching programme, she is urged to write down her thoughts in a book. This is Precious' diary, in which she honestly records her relationships and her life. Told with tremendous power, vitality and wit; this is an uncompromising and hugely enjoyable novel.

About this title

Review:

Claireece Precious Jones endures unimaginable hardships in her young life. Abused by her mother, raped by her father, she grows up poor, angry, illiterate, fat, unloved and generally unnoticed. So what better way to learn about her than through her own, halting dialect. That is the device deployed in the first novel by poet and singer Sapphire. "Sometimes I wish I was not alive," Precious says. "But I don't know how to die. Ain' no plug to pull out. 'N no matter how bad I feel my heart don't stop beating and my eyes open in the morning." An intense story of adversity and the mechanisms to cope with it.

Precious is now a major motion picture based on the novel Push by Sapphire, starring Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe, Mo'Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, and Lenny Kravitz. Enjoy these images from the film, and click the thumbnails to see larger images.

From the Back Cover:

In an electrifying novel, a black street girl, sixteen years old and pregnant, again, with her father's child, speaks. In a voice that shakes us by its language, its story, and its unflinching honesty, Precious Jones records her journey up from Harlem's lowest depths... For Precious, miraculously, hope appears and the world begins to open up when a courageous black woman - a teacher hellbent to teach - bullies, cajoles, and inspires her to learn to read, to define her own feelings and set them down in a diary: to discover the truth of her life. Day after day they go over the pages, translating the illiterate but developing language of Precious' journals. The learning process itself, as vividly revealed as the most brutal aspects of Precious' daily existence, is the heartbeat of a novel that will disturb, galvanize, and stay in the mind.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0099548720
• ISBN 13: 9780099548720
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 139