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    Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story
    Unavailable
    Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story
    Unavailable
    Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story
    Ebook189 pages2 hours

    Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story

    By Asha Bandele

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “asha bandele has a poignant story to share in Something Like Beautiful. It is the love that comes through that makes this such a compelling tale.”
    —Nikki Giovanni

     

    Award-winning journalist, and author of The Prisoner’s Wife and Daughter, and performance poet featured on HBO’S Def Poetry Jam, asha bandele once again writes from the heart in her lyrical and intimate memoir Something Like Beautiful—a moving story of love, loss, motherhood, and survival. Sharing the story of her struggles as a single black mother in New York City and her tragically self-destructive near-breakdown, asha bears her soul in a book Rebecca Walker, author of Baby Love, calls “courageous, profound, and achingly beautiful.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061977190
    Unavailable
    Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story
    Author

    Asha Bandele

    Asha Bandele served as features editor and writer for Essence magazine, and a Revson Fellow at Columbia University. She is the author of the memoir The Prisoner's Wife and a collection of poetry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughter.

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    Reviews for Something Like Beautiful

    3.5/5

    24 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      After reading The Prisoner's Wife, once I saw this book on sale, I simply had to pick it up to read. Although not as engaging as The Prisoner's Wife, it's interesting to read about what happened between asha and Rashid, and how she coped with the challenges that she faced raising Nisa alone on the outside.
    • 3/5
      Subtitled "One single mother's story", that's exactly what this is. bandele writes poetry as well as prose, and it shows in this memoir. Maybe it's because our lives are so different - I'm a childless, old, married lady, as WASP as you can get, and bandele is a young, single, Black mother - but as beautifully as bandele writes, I had trouble connecting with her. Her story is interesting and very touching, it just didn't grab me. The best parts of the memoir are when she is talking about her daughter. bandele clearly adores the girl.I can see where this book would give hope and encouragement to others in the same situation and where it would spark interesting discussions in book clubs and other reading groups, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.
    • 3/5
      This book, not quite 200 pages long, took me ages to read. A little bit about Bandlele - she married a convicted murderer who was incarcerated at the time after meeting him through a college program. Bandele wrote about this part of her life in her memoir The Prisoner's Wife which I have not read. Something Like Beautiful deals primarily with her journey as a single mother but she muses on a variety of topics. I enjoyed the middle section of this book the most. This part was more about how she dealt with everyday life and frustrations, her struggle with depression, and her struggle with an abusive relationship. This part is bookended with sections that I would describe as lyrical and poetic, yet also melodramatic and repetitive. I think books can create an atmosphere as you read them, one of terror or suspense, one of laughter or sadness. Every time I picked up this book I felt as though I were sinking into the depths of melancholy. I think a big problem I had and this is, I'm sure, prejudice on my part, is that I couldn't get past the fact that this woman married a convicted murderer serving time. My feeling is that if you're considering doing this, you have issues. Along with that, I couldn't help but wonder why prisoners should get conjugal visits, and get to spend nearly 2 days in a trailer with someone and the opportunity to create children. But that's just me.
    • 4/5
      This is a beautifully written book about the author's spiritual journey through having a husband in prison, being a "single" mother in New York City, and also long repressed feelings about her own adoption and her biological mother. I admired the author's honesty, which made reading almost painful at times. Good book about how real life knocks you down and how you just keep getting back up. I do wish there had been more details about the husband in prison and his reaction to the choices the author was making out in the "real world" and would have also been interested in hearing her adopted parents' take on things.
    • 3/5
      I struggled through the first half of this memoir. Going in, I had hoped, most of all, to gain an understanding of why the author made the choice to marry a prisoner. Unfortunately, the story with Rashid is never fully developed, leaving the reader (or me, anyway) unsympathetic about her plight. In fact, I found myself more frustrated with the author than anything. Despite the fact that she comes from a supportive family, with a good education and a great job, the author seems to blame all of her troubles on being a woman of color. The second half of the book, however, is significantly better, as Bandele details her downward spiral into severe depression and the struggle to find herself again. I will likely recommend this book to a friend who is battling depression; however, tell her to skip the first half.
    • 3/5
      "Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story" tells of the author 's struggles as both the wife of an incarcerated man and as a single parent. At the age of 23, asha bandele visited a prison (as was required for a college course) and met an inmate, Rashid. They soon fell in love, and because she was hopeful he would be released soon, she married him and became pregnant with his child. Unfortunately, her hopes were dashed and she eventually realized she would be raising her daughter Nisa alone.I chose to read this book both because I have an interest in the criminal justice system, and because like the author I was a single parent for many years. Based on this, I had expected to feel sympathy for ms. bandele and was surprised when I didn't. I have no doubt she loves her daughter very much. However, her behavior sometimes made me question that love. She used alcohol as an anesthetic and became involved in an abusive relationship, all while parenting her daughter. There were times I wanted to reach though the book and shake her, reminding her to focus her energy on her child, and not herself. Because I felt unable to relate to the author or her choices, I am unable to recommend this book.
    • 3/5
      This is a heartfelt accounting of one women, one black women’s struggles to realize her position as a single mother with all the trials and tribulations that go along with that state of being. In the beginning, asha bandele reveals meeting and falling in love with a man in prison, while many people would avoid such a situation, she continued on and married this love. Creating a child, carrying that child and delivering that child (named Nisa), showed asha how difficult the road could be, but she always had the dream and belief that her man would be released. Finding out that if he was released from prison that he would be deported back to his home country was the last thing she expected. Now she had to do it on her own. Divorce, dating, job, motherhood all takes a toll on a women and this women found herself in a depression that seemed to sneak up on her from nowhere. Hope of children, hope found in her own child gave her the strength not only to survive yet another blow, but to regroup enough to thrive. She must, young Nisa and herself were enough reason to concur any adventure. I have never heard of asha bandele or any of her writing before. While I do not completely know the way it feels to be a single mother, a single black mother, I am conscious of more than one similarity with the struggles of being an mother and feeling so alone and lost. This is an intriguing story, one that interested me at first because of the fact that this intelligent young women opens up about the fact that she was falling apart with her only connection to life, her beautiful daughter. I did enjoy the story, the courage it took to pull things together and the courage it took to write/tell about some of the hardest things in life to deal with, (our own inner self) I was a bit disappointed in the story telling process. Coming from an author, editor, and poet, I had expected a certain amount of either flourishing prose or orderly novel type story telling, this book offers both in small quantities which make the flow inconsistent and at times difficult to follow.This is an Advanced Reader Edition, this book is not available until February 2009. I received this ARE as part of the Collins Reads initiative, to find out more you can go to CollinsReads.com