Book Review of The Road Out by Deborah Hicks
A valuable book which talks about teacher’s journey of hope and discovery with her students
A moving
memoir depicting a teacher's experience leading a literary workshop for gifted
young girls from a foresaken neighborhood in Cincinnati.
Her students
were descendants of Appalachian migrants who moved North for jobs that have
since vanished. In 2000, while volunteering as a teacher, Hicks decided to
experiment with an after-school and summer program that emphasized literature
and creative writing for a small group of girls over time. Most of the girls in
the class “had lost their mothers to drugs, neglect, and the debilitating
effect of poverty,” while fathers tended to be abusive or absent. Yet Hicks
found them responsive to books and authors
that explored the world via working-class or female protagonists (as well as the transgressive release of horror fiction, which the girls loved). She describes mentoring a core group of eight girls from ages 8 to 12; she reconnected with them at 16. Her carefully constructed memoir fleshes out the girls as characters, capturing their inner ambitions and innate creativity; yet this makes the economic forces stacked against them at their young ages even clearer, giving this tale a grueling, ominous undertone. “I began to realize... that there exists a shadow system of high school education for young people living in the margins of access and opportunity,” writes Hicks. In the epilogue, she asserts that even though “the lives of poor and working-class whites have come under increased scrutiny in the media,” a post-secondary education remains both challenging and vital for those looking to escape poverty and achieve social mobility
The author's own life story--from a poorly educated girl in a small mountain town to a Harvard-educated writer, teacher, and social advocate--infuses this chronicle with a message of hope.
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