" I read Push for a class. While I can't say I would have ever voluntarily picked it up, I lost count of how many times I looked up a passage for the paper I was writing and found myself, yet again, at the end of the book. This, however, I just didn't care for. I picked it up at the library, largely because Sapphire had created such a compelling character in Precious that I really wanted to know what happened next, seeing as how this was the sequel and all. I have to admit that it really bothered me that a woman who had been through so much and took so much time and effort to turn her life around and be the best possible mother for her son, knowing that she had HIV, apparently never gave a thought to what would happen to that son she after she was gone. (I get that grandma wasn't an option - I wouldn't, either - but deliberately dooming a child to a life of foster care bothers me. A lot.) I can't fault her for not sharing her son's history with him (some things are just too much for a 9 year old to handle) but right from the get-go, it's pretty clear that this is not going to end well.
I stuck with it, even after deciding I just plain don't like Abdul...or perhaps it's merely the way Sapphire writes from a male perspective. I slogged through Toosie's narrative...and by the time My Lei was telling her story, I realized I was skimming more than actually reading. With Push, I genuinely cared about Precious, and something in her story resonated with me. The Kid was the polar opposite in that I couldn't find a shred of empathy for any of the characters. I found myself longing for the brief snippets of journal entries that Push had offered, or some other storytelling device that would somehow make me care about these characters.
Don't even get me started on the fourth part of the book, which was utterly perplexing and left me wondering what on earth I had just read. "Loose ends" is beyond an understatement. I like books that leave me with questions and stick in my head for months afterward. This was a situation where the ending was unresolved, and quite frankly, that pissed me off, since that was the sole reason I'd stuck with it - the hope of some (any!) resolution to some (any!) part of the narrative.
Quite frankly, after writing a 10 page paper on Langston Hughes this past semester, I found myself spending more time drawing parallels between Hughes and the various events and characters of The Kid than I did processing or getting emotionally invested in the novel. I would say that perhaps that's the brain training of an English major, save that I don't typically have that issue except with novels I can't engage with.
Ultimately, what I was looking for was to find out that Precious had been a good mom (she was), what had happened to the other girls from Each One Teach One (which we only get a tiny glimpse of), and that Abdul had ended up with a better future than his mother (he didn't), and I'm glad to be moving on to something else...which makes me sad, since Push was such a compelling novel, and this simply wasn't. "
— Roberta, 2/20/2014