All you had to do was remember a feeling: being so scared that your blood turned icy (Tony, the Germans) being angry enough that your bones burned up and crumbled to ash (. . . Later, at school, the immediacy of her reactions comes into its own: “I was good at Drama. I was learning how stories could make me feel safe.” Janie’s a sponge, absorbing expletives, anger, and her mother’s furious, erratic, manic love, but that same physicality is just as compelling during softer moments, when Iris tickles her or when Iris, Janie, and her younger sister, Tiny, curl up in bed together, “a set of Russian dolls, each protecting the other.”Īt the age of 6, she discovers the joys of public libraries: “When I opened the books, and I could open as many as I liked because it cost us nothing, the pictures lay on my eyes like oil on water and the dancing letters settled on my tongue with the smell and the taste of black-jack sweeties.
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