"My year has been hell. My daughters got kidnapped and raped and Kia’s father was murdered. It took a lot for me to hold it together for my girls."
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Understandin Tha Struggles 2 Survive by Destiny Tynetta Henry Trafford Publishing
book review by P. Hooper
Surviving is hard enough as a young, single mother, but when the characters in this novel are faced with epic-sized tragedies, they confront heartbreak that threatens to destroy their families. Alicia, Jasmine, and Tiffany are sisters who have each made terrible decisions about the men in their lives and are forced to live with the consequences of those choices.
Alicia, the youngest of the three, is 19 years old and has a daughter, who is critically injured by the baby's father. As Alicia struggles to understand why her boyfriend would shoot his own daughter, she attempts to straighten out her life and finish college, but more tragedy is waiting for her. After a tragic accident, Jasmine is forced to accept that her husband has been cheating on her. She struggles to recover from the murder of two of her children and wonders if her family will ever be the same again. Tiffany, the mother of four small children, is abandoned by her boyfriend who betrays her. Through it all, the sisters realize they must stick together, because they have no one else on whom they can rely.
Filled with child abuse, rape, domestic violence, and murder, Henry's novel is a fast-paced tragedy. Henry doesn't sugar coat what these women endure, but captures the harsh realities that teen mothers face when they choose bad men as mates. Written in slang and street vernacular, the voices of the three characters resonates with sounds of the street.