NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
Includes a Reading Group Guide
Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old, has up until now been invisible to the father who rapes her and the mother who batters her and to the authorities who dismiss her as just one more of Harlem's casualties. But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment as she learns not only how to write about her life, but how to make it truly her own for the first time.

Reviews

A first novel by a highly touted African American poet will have an ambitious 150,000-copy first printing.

With this much anticipated first novel, told from the point of view of an illiterate, brutalized Harlem teenager, Sapphire (American Dreams), a writer affiliated with the Nuyorican poets, charts the psychic damage of the most ghettoized of inner-city inhabitants. Obese, dark-skinned, HIV-positive, bullied by her sexually abusive mother, Clareece, Precious Jones is, at the novel's outset, pregnant for the second time with her father's child. (Precious had her first daughter at 12, named Little Mongo, "short for Mongoloid Down Sinder, which is what she is; sometimes what I feel I is. I feel so stupid sometimes. So ugly, worth nuffin.") Referred to a pilot program by an unusually solicitous principal, Precious comes under the experimental pedagogy of a lesbian miracle worker named, implausibly enough, Blue Rain. Under her angelic mentorship, Precious, who has never before experienced real nurturing, learns to voice her long suppressed feelings in a journal. As her language skills improve, she finds sustenance in writing poetry, in friendships and in support groups-one for "insect" survivors and one for HIV-positive teens. It is here that Sapphire falters, as her slim and harrowing novel, with its references to Harriet Tubman, Langston Hughes and The Color Purple (a parallel the author hints at again and again), becomes a conventional, albeit dark and unresolved, allegory about redemption. The ending, composed of excerpts from the journals of Precious's classmates, lends heightened realism and a wider scope to the narrative, but also gives it a quality of incompleteness. Sapphire has created a remarkable heroine in Precious, whose first-person street talk is by turns blisteringly savvy, rawly lyrical, hilariously pig-headed and wrenchingly vulnerable. Yet that voice begs to be heard in a larger novel of more depth and complexity. 150,000 first printing; first serial to the New Yorker; audio rights to Random; foreign rights sold to England, France, Germany, Holland, Portugal and Brazil. (June)

"You feel you've witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul." --"Entertainment Weekly"
"Affecting and impassioned. . . . Sails on the strength of pure, stirring feeling." --"The New York Times Book Review"
"A fascinating novel that may well find a place in the African-American literary canon. . . . With a fresh new voice that echoes the streets, Sapphire's work is sure to win as many hearts as it disturbs minds." --"Philadelphia Inquirer"
"A horrific, hope-filled story [that is] brilliant, blunt, merciless." --"Newsday"
"Brutal, redemptive. . . . You just can't take your eyes off Precious Jones." --"Newsweek"
"A stunningly frank effort that marks the emergence of an immensely promising writer." --"Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"[Sapphire] writes with a poet's ear for rhythms, in a voice that pushes her story relentlessly into your mind." --"Interview"
"Push . . . develops so richly and fearlessly that one cannon resist its p