Don't Erase Me: Stories

by Carolyn Ferrell

Book Overview

Ferrell's remarkable stories show young people on the verge of being erased from society--but determined to endure. "Each story is a song, the voice tuned to perfection"--Tobias Wolff. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395713277
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 163 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

I won't erase you

This book is a great achievement. Though the writer spends much of her time with the unruly and the unloved in the heart of America's forgotten impoverishments, it sparkles with honesty and pathos. I picked this one up with some trepidation, worried that I was reading another apologist manifesto; O woe is we, we are so poor, we are so down trodden, help us please. No one in this very human book of human sins and forgiveness is asking for help from you of any kind. What the writer has done is paint humanity in still life. This is who we are, okay? This is our mirror, not our tin beggar's cup.

Typical Treatment

When this book came out a couple of years ago, I read about it in one of my wife's magazines and went out to get a copy at the neighborhood bookstore. Their computer said they had a copy or two, but the clerk could not find one on the shelf. Typical, I said, and went to another bookstore, Border's I think, where after some struggle I found their lone copy. I read the entire thing in one sitting, and I enjoyed it just as much as the article in the women's magazine said that I would. Ms. Ferrell's prose is remarkable and her treatment of the topic is fresh. I especially loved the couple stories near the end that featured interracial protagonists and their struggle. That is something you don't read about everyday, and in Germany to boot. I left the book with my friend, award-winning poet Geoffrey Philp, and he came back confirming that Don't Erase Me was a work of passion and brilliance. I said to him: "Then why is it so difficult to find in stores? Why only one or two copies on the shelves? After being reviewed in a national magazine?" This is not the way brilliance should be treated. But it is typical.

Carolyn Ferrell is remarkable!

Carolyn Ferrell gives voice to urban teenagers trying to make sense of their lives. Her stories are poignant, harsh, unvarnished, true, and her compassion for these young people redeems them. Her characters' lives are heartbreaking, tragic, bleak, and yet their stories are surprisingly uplifting, for they highlight the human ability to seek love and meaning in the most barren of circumstances and thereby survive. Carolyn Ferrell is a true original. Her prose is masterful, her insight stunning. This is an unsettling, absorbing, thought-provoking book. I highly recommend it!