A beautiful account of a mother's life and a testament to her love and spirit
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The joy of this book, aside from the beauty of the poetic prose and the vivid voice of the author as a young girl, are the threads of unmistakeable love and optimism which weave throughout the narrative, drawing the reader on, even when life is harrowing and the future bleak. We learn the fate of Dorothy, but we also learn something of the wondeful legacy she left for her children and future generations. An uplifting, intelligent book, beautifully written.
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A pilgrimage across four generations and three countries
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Pilgrim State is a tribute to the writer's mother, Dorothy, who died young forty years ago. But it is also a piece of history. Short vignettes describe life in Jamaica and Harlem, and the core of the book is set in London in the nineteen sixties.
The subject of the book is Walker's gradual discovery of who her mother was. The structure of the book is rather complex. Walker uses a number of devices, including imagined scenes of her mother's early life, transcripts of US and UK State papers, narration through the eyes of the author as a little girl, and finally narration through herself as a mother in the 21st century. Walker is particularly successful in evoking the world as seen through her young narrator's eyes. This reader found himself smiling frequently.
The book is essentially a memoir, but Walker writes at times with great poetic intensity, which for this reader was one of its principle pleasures. A broken pearl necklace lands in a lap "like a storm of hailstones", or blossom obscures gutters "in ankle-deep drifts of falling spring". This is typical of the lovely writing. There is also a lot of joy in the story, and misery too. Wisely, Walker is careful not to over-dramatise the injustice and racism that she recounts, but lets them speak for themselves through her young narrator. The effect is shocking, and moving.
Pilgrim State is fuelled by filial love, and maternal love. Throughout the book, and in an extraordinarily imaginative preface and epilogue, the reader is invited to enjoy Walker's identification with her inheritance and legacy. Quite apart from the strengths alluded to above, Pilgrim State is a poetic, personal and pleasurable addition to the narration of Black experience.
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mothers, daughters and the spaces between them
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Pilgrim State defies expectations and redefines a genre of fictionalised autobiography that has been tainted over recent years by writers eager to cash in on the public appetite for distasteful hard luck stories.
This is a beautifully crafted, literary work that contains, in the story of one life, a fascinating social history of our time. The author manages to portray her experiences as both specific and universal in a way that cannot fail to capture both the imagination and the emotions of the reader.
Walker's ability to set the scene and tell the story made me feel just as at home in 1950s Jamaica as in the London streets I know so well, as I followed Jackie through her childhood towards a resolution that I found personally uplifting.
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An extraordinary memoir
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This is a beautifully written memoir and is not to be missed. Jacqueline Walker writes with a rare lyricism in this true story of grit and struggle. Her portrayal of a child's viewpoint is extremely well achieved and real, and the theme of motherhood is moving without becoming cloying. I thoroughly recommend this book!
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Pilgrim State
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This book raised a flood of emotions in me with it's beautiful depiction of a family who are supportive and comforting to each other through the tribulations of poverty, immigration, single-parenthood, racism and mental ill-health. Although the mother, Dorothy, was often struggling, she imparted to her children a sense of home, stability and an appreciation of the finer joys of daily living. This book never becomes mawkish - it just reminds us of the power of mother love in a child's eyes. Lyrical.
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