Generally, I’m not a big fan of memoirs, and I didn’t expect much of this book. How wrong I was!

This the first part of Maya Angelou‘s autobiography. This book is about her childhood (from 6 to 16) with her grandmother in Arkansas and other places in the 1930s and 1940s. She talks about family and neighbors, friends and more adversarial characters, and her grandmother’s business as well as life in their church community. All of this takes place under the searing racism of the southern USA of that era.

What an excellent storyteller Maya Angelou is! She has a casual way of talking about occurrences - everyday events as well as remarkable ones. She looks back at her childhood full of wisdom and with insights she gained in her later life. Maya Angelou sometimes uses an almost poetic language, translating her perception of seemingly mundane situations. I marked several phrases and paragraphs so I can come back to them later - timeless wisdoms that will stay with me for a long time.

It was a pleasure to follow the young Maya Angelou in this book. I learned a lot about this era of American history, as well as the places and (more importantly) the parts of society she experienced. This book is painful and heartwarming at the same time, and I happily did something I very rarely do: I give a five-star rating to this exceptional piece of literature.

Warning: This book contains scenes of violence, including rape, and describes the horrifying racism that Maya Angelou had to endure.