Skinny Little Black Girl by Rev. Yemaja Sekhmet-Maat.

This book is a first person narrative of a young woman born during the 70's in Stirchley, Birmingham. The author was formerly known as Josephine Mintah and she has written this book for her own peace of mind. Skinny Little Black Girl is a survivor's tale of rape, alcohol and drugs.

This tale highlights the problems many girls have growing up, troubles at home and forming relationships while their hormones are raging. This book showed great promise as Josephine started to make her way in life with many mistakes along the way. She got older with more problems and mistakes along the way. With one setback after another her story rolled along. Because this is a survivor's tale, it has a happy ending as Josephine changes her name to Yemaja. I am pleased that she has managed to turn her life around after some very bad experiences in her younger years.

Skinny Little Black Girl is not a good book to read. I thought Yemaja rambles on an awful lot and her story lacks focus. It is like having an over long conversation with a drunken woman who insists on telling you her life story. There is little structure to this book and lacks editing to make the story clear. Her story lacks depth and this is quite a shallow tale of an ordinary girl having an ordinary life.

I did not really enjoy this book as I did not find it entertaining. There were no bits where I thought "this is good!". I did not develop an empathy for Yemaja as she stumbled from one mistake to the next. The sections involving sex, alcohol or drugs were not exciting and were rather tame. Nothing in this book would offend your grandmother. Some chapters were very brief as these were stand alone chapters of peotry. These poems made no sense to me and I found their inclusion a nuisance and a waste of my time.

I found Skinny Little Black Girl lacking in action. depth and quality of writing. Yemaja lacks the ability to tell a good story and her book left me cold. I read books for pleasure and this book failed to amuse me, so I will give it the minimum score of 1 star.

Skinny Little Black Girl is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook and was written in 2013.