book reviews
"Part of what makes At-Risk immensely appealing is the sense that Gautier has captured facets of youth which transcend borders. . . . Despite its title, this is not a debut composed of rapid shocks and dangers, but a quieter accumulation of heartbreaking pressures. Another treasure in the University of Georgia Press' acclaimed series."
—Karen Rigby, ForeWord
http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/at-risk
"In these always engaging stories, Amina Gautier reminds us that behind the disturbing headlines are vibrant young people whose lives matter immeasurably. Gautier employs unflinching honesty to capture those lives, and she does so with clarity, dignity and genuine insight. At-Risk will break your heart even as it leaves you full of hope. It is a truly lovely book."
—David Haynes, author of The Full Matilda
http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/at-risk
"Similarly, though not a single story falls flat, some readers might ask that the characters be put in more dramatic situations, ratcheting up narrative tension. What “At-Risk” offers instead is 10 quietly gritty stories — sometimes moving, sometimes bleak, always realistic — that superbly and unsentimentally render African-American teenage life in Brooklyn.”
— Richard Newman, St. Louis Post Dispatch
"For the most part Gautier succeeds admirably in making each child distinct. Her stories are affecting, her children tough, sensible, and warm. And yet there’s a certain disjointedness to the way Gautier accomplishes this. We’re told time and again that her characters are average, and their speech often reflects this—they’re angry, petty, confused. But then we access the narrator’s thoughts, and it seems as though they’ve been hijacked by another voice, elegant and elegiac. It’s this voice that communicates to you the characters’ sensitivity, but it’s also this voice that most forcibly challenges Gautier’s task. When the inner lives of characters are so rich and well articulated, how are we to believe that these are the kids “at-risk,” the ones who didn’t learn how to fight their way out?
The tone is, of course, most wistful and most beautifully meditative in stories told in the first-person past tense. But this too is a complicated choice: it removes the risk. We know these children made it somewhere. We know they survived to reflect. In some cases, we even know these average children went on to succeed as well as the more talented ones:
'On college campuses, I would see sorority women like the ones who tried to mentor me. I would go to their step shows and social programs, watching them hungrily . . . And I would think of how I had missed my chance to know their secret ways, how I had closed myself out.'
It’s possible to say that Gautier’s stories demonstrate how difficult it is to really capture the average voice. The temptation of writing with beauty and wit seems unavoidable, even when it works against an author’s purpose. But it’s also possible that the tension between her characters’ exteriority and interiority guides us and continues to tell the story. It’s impossible not to note, for example, that the final story is told in the third-person: a child so soon to die has little time for reflection. Almost universally, in fact, the characters most perilously positioned—the young mother, the friend of the children killed, a girl who picks up an older man out of boredom and some desire—are the ones whose stories are told third-person. The ones whose problems seem slightly more existential and certainly less harrowing, like the boy who fails to defend his bullied brother or the girl who avoids an afternoon tea, tell their stories in the first-person. At-Risk is somewhat misleadingly titled: while risk suggests a degree of uncertainty, these outcomes have already been decided."
-Joey McGarvey works in publishing. She is a graduate of Stanford University and is currently earning her master’s at New York University. She is also a founding member of [tk] reviews.