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Nine Years Under: Coming Of Age In An Inner-City Funeral Home (2013)

by Sheri Booker(Favorite Author)

3.38 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1592407129 (ISBN13: 9781592407125)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Gotham

review 1: This is the story of Sheri Booker who was only fifteen years old when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She stuck it out with the, quite frankly weird and abusive, manager until she left to pursue a career in writing. The book professes to be "darkly comic" and the front cover compares it to the TV show The Wire. Hmmm. It's a bit of a mish-mash of dating, death and dealing with the bereaved but never quite comes together. It's a shame as her experience of dealing with inner city gun and drugs violence could have made an interesting memoir. The writing is uneven and reads like a teen girl's diary - "this happened and then I did this....". There is little attempt to get beyond superficial story telling and the whole book reads like an entry for a c... moreollege creative writing course. Big disappointment.
review 2: Just... Boring. Six Feet Under meets The Wire? Darkly comic? Hardly. A sheltered young girl gets a secretarial job in an interesting place. Spouts off run-of-the-mill funeral home stories. Has some pipe-dream fantasy that the son and heir to the funeral home will live happily ever after with her. Is shocked when the girl he has been seeing "off and on" reacts badly when she sleeps with him. Has no actual experience with the "mean streets" of Baltimore. (Oh, but she dated a drug dealer. That gives her automatic cred, right?) Has no actual experience with anything really. (A pre-op transgendered female bites it and you have to specify that they be dressed in a skirt even though they are technically still a man? Gasp!) Gets fired after being physically threatened by a patron - apparently gay men already don't like women so it's normal and acceptable for them to want to injure women too. This after another longterm employee gets fired for taking a week off to get a biopsy. The boss didn't believe her... So that's that. The woman is apparently deceased now, but hey, no big thing. And a week later... Everything is hunky dory. How could you stay mad at your asshole ex-boss when you're getting paid to write a book about your time in his employ? Skip it. There are many far more interesting insider looks at the funeral industry out there. less

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