Veronica - Book Review

Veronica, by Veronica Holloman, is the story about the author’s life.  Holloman writes her story in the cadence of a storyteller who is sitting face to face with you recounting her memories of her life as they bubble to the surface of her consciousness. It’s in a literary style in which thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue.  Holloman uses the lexicon of the community she was a part of as the vernacular to convey her story.

Holloman recounts a story of a young Afro American girl growing up in the fifties and sixties cared for by relatives, her Great Aunt Rose and Great Grandmother Eula Mae,  instead of a conventional family. She relates that her mother was only thirteen when she gave birth to Veronica. Having a baby at such a young age caused her mother to experience extreme mental issues which led to slipping into abusive drug and alcohol habits. In the 1950’s having a child out of wedlock was met with ridicule and condemnation. Her father abandoned her mother and never played any significant role in her life.

Holloman gives you a critical view of the ramshackle tenement housing in Harlem where she was born.  It was a dilapidated place infested with rats, roaches and other undesirables. She recounts that she had nowhere really to play while living there and the horror of witnessing the death of a child that fell from the tenement to the concrete below. She writes, “He was only one year old and fell to his death. It was one of the saddest things you could ever see in your life. When he hit the ground, he was split open the blood that came from him, you did not know that a baby had that much blood in his body..”  The autobiography is full of interesting anecdotes that are told matter-of-factly without dramatization or fancifulness.

Holloman leads you through a very troubled teenage life rife with sexual abuse, drug use, prostitution and other terrible living experiences. She tells of how her view of men was twisted from the abusive incidents she endured early in her life. However, through it all, Veronica maintains her spirit to live and thrive in a world that is full of challenges most teenagers and young women never face. Holloman wrote the book to help inspire others not to give up even when life seems to present only struggles, challenges, difficulties, and heartbreaking adversities. “Veronica,” is truly a different type of book. It’s not written as a literary masterpiece, but as a tell-all story of a woman who went through a life of hell and finally escaped into a better world, with purpose, love, and a  future.