I found myself rereading many of the passages in this memoir, poetic descriptions that struck me to the core:

"Ages since the winter-beaten grasses drew us way into the woods and you reached my face and I was already warming to you. I didn't love you, but I was smiling, in a little patch of peace. I ran behind the trees but not far and you wrote about my face on yellow lined pads, crumpled in dirt with dandelions. You kept writing, sinking into the early mosquitoes and newly born leaves, and I knew something, but the birds digested all the words I tried to make into sentences." (165)

Such passages (even more potent in context to the larger, looming and heartbreaking tale that makes up the whole of this book) were potent and required, from this reader, pause. This is not a book to read passively. Nor is this a book for those who live by the out-of-sight-out-of-mind philosophy. Rayman-Rivera doesn't sugarcoat or coddle the sensitive or censor-happy sort.

This is a book for those who want to read about one woman's truths, striking and poetic; who is willing to engage with the text, go down into the murkiness and examine up-close what is often silenced in our country. This book is inspirational, if only because the author lived through what she records and has found from her experience a voice that is beautiful and more, undeniably potent.