noodleboy667's review against another edition
5.0
I picked this up mainly because Cara just read it, but also because of the current state of things here in the UK. Recently there’s been a lot of uproar about how we’re looking after our poorest children as a nation, and that upsets me. The kids don’t have a choice and we must look after them. Kerry Hudson brings us along on her investigation and research into her own past as someone who grew up in the poorest towns and cities across the UK. She shifts between her memories as a child and the feelings she has as she walks the same streets over thirty years later. It’s sad knowing that Kerry’s experiences are being lived out by many other children right now, many of which will have even tougher and harder upbringings. It leaves me with a few thoughts - 1) what’s changed about how we help the poorest families and children in the past 30+ years? 2) what can I do right now to help children in poverty? 3) how many families are shifting into poverty due to the impacts of a global pandemic? 4) and what, as a collective nation, do we need to do to break the cycle of poverty through generations?
wendoxford's review
3.0
Memoir of life on the edge, the peripatetic life filled with deprivation, abuse, hunger, dysfunction, shame, rage, cyclical violence etc. It reads as survivor's guilt from a woman who has physically escaped the poverty trap and yet, inevitably is defined and damaged by her childhood.
It is raw, this insight into true grinding poverty. It is certainly a brave writer who returns to the places of her past to look with a different set of eyes behind the curtains and seeing the next generation of hardship. It makes you question the scope and missed opportunities of our welfare state. Seen in parallel with Tony Parker's "People of Providence", Ken Loach's "Sorry We Missed You" and indeed American writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich it should be a catalyst for anger for social justice.
It is raw, this insight into true grinding poverty. It is certainly a brave writer who returns to the places of her past to look with a different set of eyes behind the curtains and seeing the next generation of hardship. It makes you question the scope and missed opportunities of our welfare state. Seen in parallel with Tony Parker's "People of Providence", Ken Loach's "Sorry We Missed You" and indeed American writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich it should be a catalyst for anger for social justice.
anasuarez's review against another edition
4.0
After finishing this book, I can only quote Kerry's Twitter and say that the tories must never be forgiven, or as I prefer to say it: f*ck the tories. I was definitely expecting more political commentary from this book but it was still a very interesting biography to read.