This memoir is sobering, absorbing, and informative.  Among the many African-American coming-of-age stories now available, this one is distinctive for its compelling representation of a child’s and adolescent’s point of view.  For each stage of development Blow recreates the reasoning by which he made sense of a difficult world, navigated his confusions, and reframed his loyalties.  His mother’s love, never demonstrative but always faithful, is a steady influence he writes about without sentimentality, but with frank gratitude for the rudder it provided in an environment where other adults repeatedly broke trust.  Sexuality, a major theme, is also handled with an intelligent detachment; he writes with clarity and compassion about the challenge of identifying and occupying a social category that was at the time, and in many places still is, an uncomfortable no-man’s-land.  Making his peace with bisexuality becomes a signifier for full-fledged emergence into a thriving adulthood where he can look upon his own complex story with an understanding that becomes a gift to his readers.