It’s hard to read such an honest book full of uncomfortable truths. The author picks up where Caged Bird left off, telling her story from ages 17-19. It’s a story of beginnings and endings as she struggles to define herself as a person and find her way as an adult in a harsh world, as her family disintegrates around her. She tries on and discards personas like costumes – short order cook, grand sophisticate, professional dancer, giddy young mistress, sternly remote woman, whorehouse madam, aspiring junkie. This last venture ends the book and what an emotional nuclear bomb it was.

As she tells her story, Angelou seems to regard her younger self with both impatience and sympathy, never trying to justify her thoughts and actions, but only demonstrating how she reacted to and attempted to control her circumstances, made mistakes and learned from them, and through it we see how she grew to become the woman who inspired so many.

Vintage hardcover, picked up secondhand at a used bookshop.

I read this for The 24 Festive Tasks 2019 for Door 22 New Year’s Eve (Dec. 31): Read a book about endings, new starts, or books where things go BOOM! with fireworks on the cover, set in medieval times, about the papacy, or where miracles of any sort are performed.
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This book had me laughing and feeling so much. Her second installment is just a beautiful as the first. I felt I was seeing her not only grow in age but wisdom. And young maya was not the brightest. Things would happen to her that blew my mind. So many red flags that she was simply color blind to. I am excited to read the third autobiography to find out what is next for her, guy, her brother, and mother. Will she finally learn that writing is her gift? Will she have confidence in love in her self? I have no idea anything is possible in in the next five books. ( )

Witty, tragic, entertaining, funny, wise - as only Maya can do

The second book of Maya Angelou's autobiography telegraphing her early life with her son, Guy and her making her way in this world as a short order cook, a madame, a sex worker, and a dancer. Her works depicts the racism experienced by Blacks in the 1940's United States and conveys just how difficult it was to be bright with no prospects except those that you make for yourself. ( )

Rita is a 19 year old with a baby who is trying to make a life for herself in the 1940's. She's smart, full of life, but extremely naive. She works as a cook, as a dancer, and is finally pulled into being a prostitute. The ending features a man who brings reality to her by shooting up with heroin.

Sometimes funny, easy to read and Rita is a likeable character. ( )