Started: March 29
Finished: April 6
Notes: I've read some of Angelou's poetry over the years, but I've never read any of her prose, which is one reason I turned to this semi-autobiographical book of hers. Plus my late life was a big fan of Maya Angelou.
Mini review: This is a collection of events of Angelou's life from her earliest days in a small town in Arkansas until about the age of sixteen when she lived in San Francisco. Many of the events are of the every-day, but a few are more than that, including Angelou's rape at a young age and years later the birth of her son while she was a teenager. This is an eye-opening book about black life in America in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the rural South. That being said, while the writing here is good, Angelou is naturally a poet and I felt this actually hurt her prose to a certain extent. It's difficult to describe what I mean, but I felt in many places she spent more time focusing upon the beauty of her words than in getting the experiences and the emotions across. Obviously this is my own bias, and I repeat that the writing is good, but I often felt the emotional impact would have been stronger with more straight-forward writing in some instances. At the same time, I admit Angelou might not have wanted to be so forthright in words with all the events of her life, both the tragic and the joyous, or that she preferred to write of such events from something of an emotional distance with a focus upon the beauty of her words. Or perhaps I've got it all wrong.
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