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Can one teacher truly make a difference in her students’ lives when everything is working against them? Can a love for literature and learning save the most vulnerable of youth from a life of poverty? The Road Out is a gripping account of one teacher’s journey of hope and discovery with her students—girls growing up poor in a neighborhood that was once home to white Appalachian workers, and is now a ghetto. Deborah Hicks, set out to give one group of girls something she never had: a first-rate education, and a chance to live their dreams. A contemporary tragedy is brought to life as she leads us deep into the worlds of Adriana, Blair, Mariah, Elizabeth, Shannon, Jessica, and Alicia?seven girls coming of age in poverty.
This is a moving story about girls who have lost their childhoods, but who face the street’s torments with courage and resiliency. “I want out,” says 10-year-old Blair, a tiny but tough girl who is extremely poor and yet deeply imaginative and precocious. Hicks tries to convey to her students a sense of the power of fiction and of sisterhood to get them through the toughest years of adolescence. But by the time they’re sixteen, eight years after the start of the class, the girls are experiencing the collision of their youthful dreams with the pitfalls of growing up in chaotic single-parent families amid the deteriorating cityscape. Yet even as they face disappointments and sometimes despair, these girls cling to their desire for a better future. The author’s own life story—from a poorly educated girl in a small mountain town to a Harvard-educated writer, teacher, and social advocate—infuses this chronicle with a message of hope.
- Sales Rank: #840870 in Books
- Published on: 2013-02-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.00" w x 5.50" l, 1.06 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 294 pages
Review
“It’s become a standard book and movie trope: An idealistic teacher walks into a classroom of hardened, at-risk students and strives to reach them.But the outlines of the story, while familiar, can still surprise and inspire.” (Boston Globe Book Section 2013-03-02)
“A valuable look at the intellectual lives (and fragile potential) of girls buffeted by American social realities, and an excellent reflection on the challenges of teaching.” (Kirkus Reviews 2013-01-03)
From the Inside Flap
"I was one of those girls reading books the librarians hesitated to let me carry away, but taking from those books the resilience and strength necessary to change my life. Reading The Road Out, I was taken back to my own teenage years in the best way possible. From a place where hope seems almost impossible, we find more than hope—we find inspiration. Read this book, it is a cure for what I sometimes think is the only unforgivable sin—despair."—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
"The Road Out is vital and enriching. I think it's an important book that should be required reading for every American who's concerned with education of the poorest and most forgotten in our society. The stories [in this book] filled me with outrage and sorrow. But there's hope here, as well, and with more teachers like Deborah Hicks, perhaps that ray of hope will grow to a beam...and then to a flood." —Stephen King
“The Road Out is a moving testament to the power of fiction and friendship—as compassionate teacher Deborah Hicks gently leads us into the lives of a group of at-risk girls growing up in a white Appalachian ghetto in Cincinnati. Here are the girls who fall through all the cracks: poor, often all but abandoned, coming of age in the toughest of circumstances, yet filled with dreams nonetheless. This is an extraordinary, eye-opening, riveting book about hidden girlhoods, and real girls who will stay with you forever. Wonderful writing, astute social commentary, full of heart. A beautiful and very important book.”—Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls among other novels
"A wrenching, extraordinary tale. The Road Out is not a story of victims, but a story of passion and literacy. With abundant authority and vulnerability, Hicks uncovers unexpected insights and offers new ways to bring a love of reading along with some hope into the far corners of urban lives on the margins."—Carol Stack, author of All Our Kin and Call To Home
"This stunning book will open your eyes and break your heart. Reminiscent of Robert Coles' magisterial Children of Crisis, The Road Out is the best book I've read on the inner lives of working-class girls."—Mike Rose, author of Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education
"The Road Outis a powerful, beautifully written memoir. The author is a remarkable teacher who recounts how she struggled to use her love of literacy to help young girls in Appalachia confront the devastating forces of rural poverty that she herself faced as a child. Like all great works of literature, it tells us as much about the author and her own continuous learning experiences as it does about the remarkable girls whose stories she tells. The Road Out is ultimately a story of hope and a vindication of courage. It is also a warning shot for school reformers who preach simplistic answers to the question of how schools can deal with the impact of poverty on learning."—Edward Fiske, former Education Editor of The New York Times, and editor of the The Fiske Guide to Colleges
About the Author
Deborah Hicks has written about the lives of children for two decades. She works in the Program in Education at Duke University and directs an educational program for girls in Appalachia.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
a compelling read
By Jude
The Road Out vividly brings to life the stories of adolescent girls in Cincinnati's Appalachian ghetto. Their stories are little known, but they deserve to be famous. Reading The Road Out we come to understand in human terms the breadth and depth of problems confronting the lives of the unknown poor: parents too self-absorbed or drug addicted to raise their children, schools lacking resources or unable to see their students' potential, neighborhoods that offer those who live there little more than drugs and fights. The author ties the girls' histories to her own struggle to redeem herself from the poverty of circumstance and opportunity of her own Appalachian childhood. The prose is lively and page turning. For those who think education is all about raising test scores, Hicks illustrates how literature, the pleasure of reading, can provide a road out, a stimulus for wanting to learn. The girls are heartbreaking, but they're also so very alive--smart, sassy, resilient, and surprising. It's a book to savor and remember.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
No Answers
By UnderManyAStar
Deborah Hicks's book is a kind of "education memoir" about a special after-school reading program Hicks created for six disadvantaged girls in Cincinnati. Hicks details the lives of her students, drawing parallels with her own childhood in Appalachia, and intersperses the girls' stories with details of her literature-based curriculum and its effects upon the girls' emerging self-awareness. Between the lines is a veiled critique of the national high-stakes testing policies initiated under No Child Left Behind, with the implication that not only does "teaching to the test" deprive students (especially poor students) of valuable instructional time, but also that standardized tests are unequipped to accurately measure real intelligence. Hicks begins her after-school program in the hope of showing these poor young girls a "road out" of their bleak lives, a road paved by literature. Sadly, though perhaps predictably, Hicks's efforts and commitments do not bear the fruit she had hoped for.
Hicks is clearly not only a compassionate person, but also a creative and inspired teacher with a unique understanding of the lives of her students, who are one generation removed from rural Appalachia and now live in a white urban ghetto. But her book, I feel does not go far enough. She muses throughout the book about the possible reasons that she was able to get out of Appalachia and go to an Ivy League school while her charges are not, but she never mentions the most obvious reasons of all: her parents were married; they were not addicted to drugs; and her father had a job. Hicks's family was stable, in spite of the fact that is was not, as she suggests, happy, and this kind of stability is as foreign to the chaotic lives of her young students as the moon. In the final analysis, then, Deborah Hicks had very little in common with her students, so she failed to gauge that her after-school program would be, ultimately, so ineffective.
I do not intend this review to be a conservative polemic, but a writer as deeply invested as Hicks simply has to acknowledge that short-sighted federal educational policies are not the cause of her students' failure to leave behind lives of impoverishment and emerge as members of the wider culture. The extreme instability of her students' family lives simply could not fail to mitigate every good that Hicks intended to bring to them. Even a teacher as committed and creative as Hicks clearly is -- I found her lesson plans inspiring -- can do little to make up for the cultural and emotional impoverishment of a subculture of intergenerational poverty, addiction, and dependence -- a subculture that essentially eats its young.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Dreams and the road out
By Lou pendergrast
"When I was a young girl growing up in a sleepy Appalachian paper mill town, I had a lot of dreams for a girl with limited opportunity. Probably the biggest of all my dreams was just to get away from where I was."
This is the opening testament of the author who set on a road to do that very same thing for a group of unfortunate girls that reside in conditions more darker and truer than fiction, this dilemma is a common and increasing reality of our modern age.
She goes on to write in her introduction.
"My own life journey, from a poorly educated girl in a small mountain town to a Harvard educated writer, teacher, and social advocate is one message of hope. But then so are the stories of seven determined girls who were every bit as gifted and promising as I once was. Each different, but all steadfast in their desire for a better life than the one they had inherited. These daughters and granddaughters of southern Appalachian workers have grit and resolve, but they need much more if they are to succeed in our new unforgiving economy. The stories that follow provide a chronicle of one teacher's odyssey in poor America, and of the pitfalls and possibilities that arose along a road carved out of simple materials: literature, reading and stories of childhood dreams."
I fitting account of the tragedy and triumph that resides in these pages touching and awe inspiring. A teacher, a heroine, equipped with a pencil, a sword of victory.
With hope and belief in oneself on a journey, a road on out to a greater good, the pen could be mightier against the sword/destroyers of dreams.
A true story to read, that may inspire many.
We need more teachers like this to instil a love for the written word, I know from first hand experience, I left school at 16 born of immigrant parents, of a illiterate mother, how it sadness me to see how my mother lost out in life without being able to read words and sentences, to joy at beautiful prose, to be enlightened and aware of many things in our glorious world of written words.
Every Monday after school during the regular school year, and every day during summer school this teacher met with her students to read and talk about books and to write stories of their own.
Literature proved to me a more powerful teaching tool than anything that this teacher could use.
What she learned was that they wanted to read of horrors and the supernatural as she explains here.
"The parts of the story jammed against one another: a young girl, Stephen King, horror. This want what I had in mind when I had created my literature class for girls."
She goes on to tell what she had learned of this..
"In their improbable way, I was learning, that horror stories offered hope. Hapless heroines could outwit sinister spirits and crazies. Even stories of Rose Madder could find the inner strength to defeat the horrifying monster that Norman had become. Spirits such as Blair's Ghost Rose could speak out in angry voices, letting others know how trapped and alone they felt. I too was trying to create hope around the only form of transcendence I knew: an education rich in literature and reading."
And also in this paragraph.
"The young girls in my reading class were not alone. Horror fiction had become rampant in popular culture, so much so that parents and teachers had begun to voice concern about images of maiming and psychopathic mayhem flooding the popular book and movie market. These movies- Final Destination, The House of 1,000 corpses, Slash, 13 Ghosts-were geared to a ravenous audience of horror fans, many of them still in their teens. Such trends had led to a flurry of writing about the subject by literary and film critics, cultural scholars, and even psychoanalysts.
One explanation offered for the feeling that my girls experienced when reading scary books is the notion of a psychic safety valve. Fans of horror and ghost stories can experience a thrilling read, and yet know that in the end they will be safe. This can be cathartic-like screaming bloody murder on a roller coaster ride, then walking off with tears of laughter streaming down your face.
But this wasn't the only explanation for the strange appeal of horror. Every reader of fiction searches for the threads that can connect her life to the landscape she inherits. And these threads of connections need not be real-or not something you can see or touch in the everyday world. Fiction's special appeal is that it can take us out of this world and help us connect with what can only be seen through the imagination's inner eye. Part of the beauty of ghost stories was that they were not real. Crazy, weird, and Elizabeth's favourite word, boring-this is how my students felt about reading a realistic novel.
Elizabeth wasn't yet ready for novel about a girl who was "just like her." Could I bring myself to enjoy the kind of book that she loved?"
An awe inspiring story on a woman and seven girls battle against the odds.
These girls she taught had come from poor families, broken, and problem riddled.
Some girls had parents in jail or dead, addicted to drugs, alcohol, or who were violent abusers.
They, under this mentoring, had hope instilled but ultimately their surroundings, their home lives still had a tragic and out of their hands part in their fates.
Think in a more pleasant tone of the great Matilda, from that Roald Dahl story, and how she was helped by her kind and committed teacher against a bad teacher and bad parenting. A great teacher does wonders, a soul that one would look back on with pleasant memories and happiness on how they did it right!
A change needs to come about, to save our youth, we all need to act and help in the greater cause and message that lies in this unmissable read for 2013.
Excerpts:
` "What is it about Stephen King's books that you really enjoy?" I asked.
"The parts when scary things happen," said Blair. "And I like to read long books." Rose Madder was 420 pages long.
This story of one precocious young girl, her Stephen King book, and a hopelessly idealistic teacher helps to shed light on a big dilemma. How can education open doors for girls such as Blair, the daughter of poor whites, and a girl with dreams as big as any girl in America? Her small but important life story is part of a larger American narrative. She is the young heir to a labor history, a slice of our national life that is disappearing. The courageous southern migrants who fled Appalachian poverty had come to Midwest cities in search of manufacturing jobs and a better future for their children. Now young Blair had inherited a forgotten landscape, tormented by job loss and a growing street-drug problem. Dropout rates were high too, reflecting an inter-generational history-the earlier workers of Blair's neighborhood could find jobs without high school diploma-but also a sense of detachment from school. What Blair most needed was a first-rate education that would allow her to create a new kind of future, leading her away from the streets and their torments and toward he life her Grandma Lilly envisioned for her.
But when I set out to become an educational agent for hope and change for Blair, I discovered that the single thing that could have made the biggest difference in her life-public education-was itself part of the problem. In spite of the intentions of individuals at Blair's school, who were as hardworking as they were big-hearted, she was caught up in the same two-tiered system of schooling I had lived through. Its like John Dawson, an Appalachian migrant who moved to inner-city Chicago in the 1950s, remarked: "A poor kid don't get the same teachin' that a rich kid gets." `
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