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For many people, the mere idea of having their children taken away from them is a nightmare too difficult to imagine. In this autobiography, the author tells her story of heartbreak and sorrow followed by redemption and good fortune. Growing up, Ms. Tucker’s life was troubled. Her mother moved her and her siblings to the projects in Little Rock, Arkansas, and immediately had trouble fitting in because of their race. After suffering abuse at school, in her neighborhood, and even at home, she grows distant and detached from others save for a few close friends. Eventually, she decides to run away from home with one of those friends in order to improve her life, but a new tragedy arises when an admirer of hers rapes her in her new home and impregnates her.
Believing that her new son is the product of her new relationship, she devotes herself to her children despite being only fourteen years old. Rumors begin to swirl that her son does not belong to her boyfriend, and after two more children and years of this speculation, their relationship deteriorates and they separate. Now a full-time working mother of three at seventeen, Toni relies on her family to help her raise her children while she works to put food on the table. When a neighborhood boy hits Toni’s son with a rock, Toni’s mother bandages the wound but deems it not serious enough to warrant a doctor’s visit. This leads to child protective services coming to take the kids away, setting off a quest to get her children back that spans over three decades. Relying on faith and positive thinking, the author perseveres through her struggles, sharing both the dark times—such as losing her daughter in a fatal car accident—and the good times of being reunited with her long-lost children and rebuilding her family.
Deeply personal and touching, this book is meant to inspire others to keep the faith and move forward during times of stress and difficulty. Considering everything that happens in this book, and also that a large amount of the struggle the author goes through happens while she is still just a teenager, this is also an incredible story about accepting responsibility and making sacrifices for the things that are important to you. The obstacles that the author had to overcome in her life make for reading that is simultaneously compelling and difficult to fathom how someone so young could handle so much.
Any challenge or empathy that the reader endures during the first half of the book is paid back tenfold in the latter half when the author is reunited with her children. This moment is bittersweet at times because of the tragic loss of her daughter, but experiencing an account of having faith and dedication working out, in the end, does much to provide the book and the author’s story a happy ending worthy of her trials. Unlike many biographies, this one was quick to read through and evenly paced, only focusing on the events that were pertinent to the story the author wanted to tell: that of having her family torn apart and then reunited. By sharing a story that is uniquely hers, readers of this book will hopefully be inspired by the author’s belief, confidence, and faith and her redemption made possible through them.