This Child's Gonna Live - Hardcover

Wright, Sarah

3.96

48 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385290411 ISBN 13: 9780385290418

Publisher: Delacorte, 1969

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“Sarah Wright’s triumph in this novel is a celebration of life over death. It is, in every respect, an impressive achievement.”—The New York Times, 1969

“Often compared to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, the novel was unusual in its exploration of the black experience from a woman’s perspective, anticipating fiction by writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.”—The New York Times, 2009

Sarah Wright’s searing yet lyrical story of a Southern black woman’s life during the Depression—a period seldom accounted for in African-American literature— is as compelling as her protagonist’s insistence that "this child’s gonna live." In this lost literary masterpiece by a seminal figure in the Black Arts movement, a husband and wife struggle amidst the poverty of Maryland’s Eastern Shore during the 1930s. "Saturated in harsh beauty," declares Tillie Olsen, "this book has been and still is for me one of the most important and indispensable books published in my lifetime."

Sarah E. Wright, novelist and poet, was a former vice president of the Harlem Writers Guild and coauthor of Give Me a Child. She died at age 80 in New York City.

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About the Author:

Sarah E. Wright was born in Maryland and lives in new York City. A novelist and poet, she is former vice president of the Harlem Writes Guild and is coauthor, with Lucy Smith, of Give Me a Child.

Review:

Mariah and Jacob battle against grim and desperate poverty. One baby dies after her naval is bound with an unsterile bandage; later another dies from pneumonia, worms, and poison. Neighbors attack and gossip, hurling words in their own hopeless frustration at trying to make a living out of the used-up land and oyster beds of Tangierneck, Maryland: "wonder was that it hadn't all been washed away, the way that big, wide, bossy, ocean-going Nighaskin River keeps pouring water down into the mouth of the Neck until Deep Gut swallows all it can hold and backs the rest of it out for the ocean." It is a bleak and awful world, and Sarah Wright's language swirls up out of it, making the water, trees and buzzards seem sentient and symbolic. There is little hope and much determination, little forgiveness and far too many things to forgive in this place. The Paddy Rollers come around and lynch black men, the nearest school is still far away, and nothing seems to cure Mariah's children of their constant illnesses. Yet Mariah keeps on, dead set on getting her children out of the Neck, on finding a way out of a place without hope. Sarah Wright describes a horrible reality in stunning, beautiful, almost surreal language, creating a powerful novel that burns in your mind like the hallucinations of a fever. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister

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