Customer Reviews

The Root Worker

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Meet Ellen. A child who many have forsaken. Her mother. Her brother. The root worker.

This finely crafted novel takes you through Ellen's life a she sees it; her hope for things to change for the better. Her conflicting religious beliefs. Her pain. Her sorrow. Her triumph.

The thing I enjoyed most about this book was the fact that after I read it it still lingered in my mind. I liked the fact that while I was reading my emotions were running on overtime. When something bad happened, my heart sank. When something good happened, I almost cried tears of joy.

Warning: This is not a "candy read". Expect to be affected. Expect to feel the emotions and terror Ellen feels. Expect to feel your heart wrench. Expect to feel set free.

From now on, I will expect nothing less.

Hats off to this talented new writer on a dazzling debut.

Think Toni Morrison or Alice Walker and you have a concept of the quality of Rainelle Burton's affecting debut novel, which is based on true life events but is not autobiographical.

It is 1960s Detroit, Michigan, a hard scrabble urban community where belief in voodoo is rife - the frightened go to root workers, voodoo priestesses, trading food money for cures to banish hexes.

Eleven year old Ellen is a black girl whose mentally deficient mother believes the child is possessed by an evil spirit. Her father is a lackadaisical soul who doesn't protest when the Woman or mother consults a root worker who is soon all powerful in the family. Ellen finds no protection at home from the priestess's frightening directives nor from the nuns at the Catholic school she attends.

It is only through the kindness of a neighbor that the young girl may be able to escape her harrowing existence and discover a life of her own.

While Ms. Burton has painted a haunting reminder of a desperate community and desolate lives, "The Root Worker" is also a story of hope and the triumph of good over evil.

This is a hard book to read. Right from the start, the reader must accept the loss of hope as the road to salvation. Staying hopeful is a sure way to come to disaster.

Rainelle Burton has written a beautifully evocative story about true empowerment, using the narrative voice of a young african-american girl in a sharply bifurcated world. The young protagonist, Ellen, shuttles between her home, where she lives with a brother who sexually abuses her, a mother who she may only address as "The Woman," and a weak-willed, philandering father who she knows as "The Husband," and St. Agnes, the parish school she attends, with its wimpled nuns and robed priests. However, in Ellen's world, there are no saviors in the church or school, and there are no miracles in the potions dispensed by the root worker who The Woman pays for curatives.

Ellen calmly observes the dichotomies between what she believes her life might be and what it actually is throughout the story. She tries to make sense of her surroundings, searching for "glue" to hold things together, and to provide her with the safe haven she desires. The reader sees through Ellen's bruised and swollen eyes as stark episode after episode of poverty and ignorance reveal themselves. As readers, we share Ellen's pain and humiliation in the name of hope.

Ellen sees her own battered face and body in a shop window and identifies the girl she sees as "Clarissa," to whom she addresses many of her observations. Clarissa is Medusa-haired, puffy-eyed, scratched, and soiled, a battered confidante for a lonely, frightened little girl. What the reader discovers is that for Ellen, as for any child trapped by poverty and abuse, the only way to survive is to stop trying to find congruence in the absurdity surrounding her.

This is a remarkable book, and a remarkable outing for a first-time author. Burton's voice rings with truth, even if it's a truth we might not want to know. We can't help but admire her unflinching ability to illuminate the harsh realities of the lives in which root working still figure, and her tenderness toward Ellen.

I can't wait to read Burton's next offering.

Not since Resurrecting Mingus, have I read a book that has moved me as much as Rainelle Burton's The Root Worker.

Ellen's story is a familar story, of the girl left behind. Hers is a story of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, that trancends the ordinary dysfunctional family. This unique tale is told in the voice of a girl whose voice has been muted to nearly everyone except her imaginary friend Clarissa. Even through the midst of angst and lonliness, Ellen story is vivid, uplifting, and somewhat humerous at times.

Burton's done a wonderful thing in this story. She let us peep into the lives of an extraordinary, reluctant, heroine. Her imagery and symbolism is reminiscent of Alice Walker.

If you want a book to read that's thoughtful, extremely well written, and even mystical, then this book will not dissapoint.

I thought this was a great debut novel! Burton's style of writing is vivid! I felt great pain for Ellen, an 11-year-old African-American girl, as I read about her abuse and long-suffering in a totally dysfunctional environment. It was extremely sad to see that most of the physical, verbal, and mental abuse came from her immediate family, including her mother. The mother's reliance on the root worker's remedies to solve her marital problems, insecurities, and overall unhappiness exacerbates Ellen's misery because the root worker tends to involve Ellen as either the cause of the ills or part of the "cure". At the urging of the Root Worker, Ellen is subjected to illogical arguments that test her Christian faith, more sexual abuse, and ingestion of ungodly concoctions.

Ellen's search for solace forces her into an alternate reality---I suppose this can be viewed as a mode of self-defense. Outsiders view her as peculiar and ostracize her even more. Most of the adults in the world tend to turn a blind eye to the outward physical abuse of this impoverished black child. Because she has no friends, she invents Clarissa-whom she confides her deepest thoughts. Luckily, she is befriended and rescued by a neighbor and things look up.

The novel is told through the eyes of Ellen and I found it a little hard to follow at times, especially when defining relationships of some of the key characters and their backgrounds. There was lack of closure with some characters and I was left wanting to know more about their fate. Overall, it was an enjoyable read.

I feel as if I have waited a lifetime for someone to write this book. It's Dantesque in its reporting of someone experiencing hell, and all the more remarkable since the reporter is an eleven-year-old African American girl, Ellen. There isn't a wrong note in this story of Detroit's inner city or in the miracle of Ellen's escape and salvation. Rainelle Burton is a new voice and an absolutely true one.

I had a chance to read this book shortly after it was released. I was around 17 years old, and I understood it perfectly. The character Ellen really allows the reader to get inside of her head and know exactly what she's thinking.

To the reader who was confused about "glue," it represents any safe place. Odysseus had the same type of place in Homer's "The Odyssey..." Ithaca was what HE called it, did it confuse you that it wasn't named after a real place? Before you talk about how much of a horrible waste of time a book is to read, why not make sure you're not being narrow-minded? Perhaps when Ellen spoke of playing tag and being safe at glue, it should have meant something to you. Did you ever play tag? In fact, if you do a search for "glue" within this book, it usually is listed together with a derivative of the word "safe."

You have to read this book as if it's an autobiorgraphy told through dialogues with Clarissa... Not as if it was fiction. The book is so incredibly realistic that if you read it any other way, you're missing the point.

Great book... Would recommend it to anyone.

I loved this book. It was a switch from the "sister girl" books that I normally read. It took me back to my high school english class where a book was dissected to find all the literary meanings and symbolizations.

It was a hard read, but that made it all the better. I still havent figured out all the sympolization in the book, but I am definetly going to read it again and look a little deeper next time.

Ellens character really moved me and I definetly thought about this book long after I finished reading.

This book surpassed my expectations of a debut book. I found it to be reminiscent of Toni Morrison. The characters are a little hard to follow in the beginning but once you start reading you won't be able to put it down. This is the sory of Ellen, a young balck girl subjected to physical, verbal, and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother and her brother James. Ellen was also taken to visit a Root Worker that was paid to rid Ellen of the demons that her mother had concocted in her mind. She was told that she was evil so much that Ellen started to believe that she was evil. This book captured from me from beginning to end. Buy it now!!!

This book ripped me open, and left my insides vulnerable and exposed to the world. That's as nicely as I can convey how I felt after reading the last word of this text. The subtle nature of the writing caught me off guard and made me feel like a helpless child. When a young friend casually mentioned to Ellen that her father had seen Ellen talking to herself on the front porch, and thought that she was crazy, I gasped! I was so inside Ellen's head from the beginning of the book, and so conditioned to the assumption of sanity, that seeing an objective character's sad and demoralizing perspective of her was jarring. Seeing the full, unfolding picture of Ellen's lack of mental health staggered me and for the rest of the story, I wanted to reach into the book, pick up this damaged little girl and love her. I highly recommend The Root Worker.