Book Review: Burn Down the Ground: A Memoir

Burn Down the Ground: A Memoir by Kambri Crews

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Book Info: 
Pages: 352
Version: Hardback
Publisher: Random House

ISBN: 0345516028 (ISBN13: 9780345516022)

I won this book through the Goodreads giveaway program. I received an ARC book (personally, I don't like ARC books) and I am not required to give a good review.

Warning: This book contains abuse of all kinds. Drug abuse, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Alcohol abuse and language are all contained in this book.

Goodreads tells us that "In this powerful, affecting, and unflinching memoir, a daughter looks back on her unconventional childhood with deaf parents in rural Texas while trying to reconcile her present life—in which her father is serving a twenty-year sentence in a maximum-security prison."

I was engrossed throughout the book and found it hard to put down to even work. I have friends who are CODA and I have been involved in working with the Deaf and their community. I knew, before reading the book, about the Deaf community, ASL language syntax and ways of doing things. I know how and why it is hard to get concepts of such "abstract" ideas (such as Jesus and G-d) across to the Deaf. All of these caused me to look forward to reading this book and made the book enjoyable to me.

I am divided on how to rate this book. I gave it 4 stars as a compromise between 3 and 5.

The book is worth 5 stars for the unflinching view of Ms. Crews life and how she handled it with aplomb. What I look for in a book is the ability to take me out of mine and plop me down to experience the authors' world and experiences. Ms. Crews does this and more. I could feel her fears and her joys. I could see what made her Mother and Father into the people they were and the people they became. When reading, it made the book A Child Called "It" come to mind. Not because of the themes of violence and abuse, but because both Dave Pelzer and Kambri Crews came through hard and dangerous childhoods to become somewhat balanced and admirable people. They didn't let their childhood destroy their lives.

The 3 stars was for it's language and for the author's "seeming" to "still" accept marijuana and alcohol use as "normal" to life. I don't know if the author has stopped using marijuana (and that is illegal and damaging) no matter her "apparent" ability to not have it effect her life (unlike her brother). In fact, I kept getting the feeling the author was saying she was better than everyone else around her because of her "ability" to not allow drugs and alcohol to drag her down.

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