Blunt Scissors Book Reviews

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 16, 2019)

The “mesmerizing . . . daring and important”* story of a risk-taking girlhood spent in a working-class prison town —Andre Dubus III

Synopsis: For Maureen Stanton’s proper Catholic mother, the town’s maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line (“If you don’t behave, I’ll put you in Walpole Prison!”). But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton’s once-solid family lost its way. A promising young girl with a smart mouth, Stanton turns watchful as her parents separate and her now-single mother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything to keep a toehold in the middle class for her children. No longer scared by threats of Walpole Prison, Stanton too slips into delinquency—vandalism, breaking and entering—all while nearly erasing herself through addiction to angel dust, a homemade form of PCP that swept through her hometown in the wake of Nixon’s “total war” on drugs.

Body Leaping Backward is the haunting and beautifully drawn story of a self-destructive girlhood, of a town and a nation overwhelmed in a time of change, and of how life-altering a glimpse of a world bigger than the one we come from can be.

Review: For a child of the 80’s, married to a child of the late 60’s-70’s, this was a raw and emotional read. If you didn’t live through this time period, you tend to get a Forest Gump, hippie, free love idea of this time period when in reality teens growing up in the 1970’s faced tremendous amounts of upheaval, drugs, absentee parents due to their own drug and alcohol use and/or divorce and remarriage, etc.

It’s quite honestly a miracle that a lot of them are here today and are functioning and successful members of society – like Maureen Stanton, the author of this book.

Her writing style is unique and while her memories are interspersed throughout the book, I never got an angsty teen vibe. This book read as a mature reflection of her child and teen years and is not one I will soon forget.

I also enjoyed the historical backdrop of Nixon’s presidency and war on drugs. I feel this is a time period many would like to forget and that I don’t read much about it in the books I read today.

Body Leaping Backward was a quick read and memorable – especially for those of us who know and love people who grew up during this time. It would make a great gift for your adult child of the 70’s and one I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone wanting to better understand this time period in our country’s history – I know it gave me a lot of insight into the world my husband grew in.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours, the publisher, and the author for a copy of this book in exchange for my review and promotion. All thoughts are my own.

No two persons ever read the same book. – Edmund Wilson

4.5/5

Have you ever read the reviews of a recent book you read/listened to and wondered if those readers read the same book or even read the entire book?

Maid falls into this category for me. So many of the reviews missed the entire point of the book. As a matter of fact, they underscored just how deep our views of poverty and the working poor run.

• • • •

Stephanie Land is a young single mother who found herself pregnant and in an abusive relationship with the child’s father. The book opens with her watching her daughter, Mia, take her first steps – in a homeless shelter.

After 90 days, the maximum amount of time allowed to live in the shelter, Stephanie and Mia are moved into transitional housing which doubled as a halfway house. In a very uncomfortable scene, Stephanie’s mother and husband – visiting from Europe – help her move her belongings. The comments, the questions, and finally the expectation for Stephanie to pay for her own meal when she had $10 to her name, illustrated just how little of a support system she had.

Stephanie found a job working as a maid, earning minimum wage minus gas money to travel from house to house. Between multiple government assistance plans, minimal child support, her jobs, and her side jobs, she barely scraped by every month. She was one emergency expense away from losing what little she had.

More than once she was told “you’re welcome” by people in the grocery store line watching her use food stamps to pay for her groceries.

Cue the reviewer comments criticizing her for never saying “thank you” and acting entitled.

Have we really devolved that much? Where we expect a single parent to turn around in the checkout line and thank us after using government assistance to pay for groceries. How sad and ignorant.

In the book Land did express her gratitude multiple times for the assistance they received, despite how often she was shamed and stigmatized. She wholeheartedly acknowledged that they would not have survived without the programs.

• • • •

This memoir chronicles her struggles and tackles head-on, the stigmas of living in poverty and receiving government assistance. Her writing is excellent and if readers are willing to set aside their own opinions, it is very easy to slip into her shoes. My one critique would be the timeline – at times it was difficult to follow.

I am glad for the help that Stephanie received. This book would not exist without it and the stigmas would continue. We need more books like Maid.

And of course this book wasn’t all sadness and struggle – there were interesting and amusing parts as well. She pulled back the curtain and gave the reader a look into the world of house cleaning from a maid’s perspective. I know that I am going to be a better host for our cleaning service. Stephanie wrote about feeling invisible to her clients, despite the dirty work she did, and I never want someone feeling like that when they are in my own home.

I also don’t want to end up in one of their memoirs.

Who would I recommend this book to? If you enjoyed Educated, Heavy, or Where the Crawdads Sing, you will enjoy Stephanie’s writing, strength, and resilience.

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