Firstborn Girls

February 1, 2025
A distinguished novelist explores the history that shaped her and the women in her family. In 1967, a year that saw almost 160 race riots across the United States, 2-year-old McFadden and her mother, Vivian, survived a fiery car crash that marked them for life. Both were survivors; in this memoir, McFadden reveals how both were scarred, not only by race and gender, but by a family history of "festering wounds." Like Vivian, the author witnessed violence--brought about through her father's alcoholism--and disarray at home. She contemplated taking her "exit" at age 7, until her paternal grandmother offered her summer stays at her home in Barbados. McFadden observes that when she was a teenager, Vivian made her a "fully indentured third parent" to more children she had with the husband who abused her. McFadden temporarily escaped from family "servitude" to a boarding school, graduated, then reluctantly returned home. Yet it was in that chaotic space that she also began writing personal stories and reading Alice Walker'sThe Color Purple. That novel helped her embrace the beauty of being a young Black woman--and also her childhood dream of becoming a writer. What makes McFadden's book so absorbing is the way it quietly demonstrates how history is "a hard thing to shake." Patterns--like out-of-wedlock pregnancies and interfamilial or social violence--are repeated. But they need not determine outcomes: once they are accepted and honored, they can forge fulfilling paths forward. A powerful, richly tapestried book about race, history, love, and the healing power of the written word.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2025
Novelist McFadden (Praise Song for Butterflies, 2018) delivers the captivating, multigenerational stories of her family in a poignant memoir. "The first thing I want to tell you is that on September 27, 1967, I died." So begins her personal account of experiencing a harrowing car accident that nearly took her life at the age of two. What follows is a layered, compelling description of her childhood in Brooklyn with her beloved mother, Vivian, three younger siblings, and their volatile, abusive father, Robert. A bookish child searching for ways to escape her rigid household, she spends her formative years finding succor in books and writing in her journal, discovering a particular freedom in written words. Alongside her personal experiences, she populates her memoir with the vividly rendered women of her family and their histories within the larger historical context. McFadden's sharp memories are eloquently recorded and her evocative writing is transportive, whether she's describing Brooklyn in the 1970s, Detroit in the 1940s, or a childhood summertime in Barbados. Give to readers of How to Say Babylon and Somebody's Daughter.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.