Reader Review: "Take My Hand"
by Anthony Conty (Parkville, MD): "Take My Hand" by Dolen Perkins-Valdez features a nurse who works with sexual and reproductive health that receives the odd task of injecting birth control into eleven and fourteen-year-old sisters. Again, we go back and forth between the past and the present, foreshadowing that something went wrong with that arrangement.
I have to give an odd moment of props to the summary writers on the flap because they keep most of the plot points a secret. Of course, once the story progresses, you see where it is going, but that happens organically. Civil, the nurse, tries to help the kids and their families by giving them a new apartment, clothes, and cleaning supplies but finds out that the decision to provide them with birth control shots causes them more harm than good.
As with most Jim Crow novels set in the 1970s, I had to question how close to reality this fiction lived seriously. If such experimental procedures existed specifically on Black Americans, how recently did that occur? If they decided on a tubal ligation for little Erica and India before they even had relations (or their periods, for that matter), where did one draw the line about what was too intrusive for people with low incomes?
Like most award-winning novels about hard times and dark periods in our nation's history, "Take My Hand" takes the opportunity to find positivity just as the characters do. Erica and India went through hell but still acted like kids. However, when we realize that the problem goes much deeper, we enter a legal drama to address a widespread problem in which health organizations play God and deem others unfit to reproduce.
A co-worker whose opinion I trust said that I read the most depressing stuff. When you pick award-winners, you will get a hold of the Holocaust, civil rights, and war. I like what they make me think about. If the world thought involuntary sterilization was acceptable in the 70s, we must question how much fiction was. It changes the whole abortion debate, too, not that I ever want to have that conversation.
by Anthony Conty (Parkville, MD): "Take My Hand" by Dolen Perkins-Valdez features a nurse who works with sexual and reproductive health that receives the odd task of injecting birth control into eleven and fourteen-year-old sisters. Again, we go back and forth between the past and the present, foreshadowing that something went wrong with that arrangement.
I have to give an odd moment of props to the summary writers on the flap because they keep most of the plot points a secret. Of course, once the story progresses, you see where it is going, but that happens organically. Civil, the nurse, tries to help the kids and their families by giving them a new apartment, clothes, and cleaning supplies but finds out that the decision to provide them with birth control shots causes them more harm than good.
As with most Jim Crow novels set in the 1970s, I had to question how close to reality this fiction lived seriously. If such experimental procedures existed specifically on Black Americans, how recently did that occur? If they decided on a tubal ligation for little Erica and India before they even had relations (or their periods, for that matter), where did one draw the line about what was too intrusive for people with low incomes?
Like most award-winning novels about hard times and dark periods in our nation's history, "Take My Hand" takes the opportunity to find positivity just as the characters do. Erica and India went through hell but still acted like kids. However, when we realize that the problem goes much deeper, we enter a legal drama to address a widespread problem in which health organizations play God and deem others unfit to reproduce.
A co-worker whose opinion I trust said that I read the most depressing stuff. When you pick award-winners, you will get a hold of the Holocaust, civil rights, and war. I like what they make me think about. If the world thought involuntary sterilization was acceptable in the 70s, we must question how much fiction was. It changes the whole abortion debate, too, not that I ever want to have that conversation.
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