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In this gritty, confessional memoir, Michelle Tea takes the reader back to the city of her childhood: Chelsea, Massachusetts-a place where time and hope are spent on things not getting any worse. Tea's girlhood is shaped by the rough fabric of the neighborhood and by its characters-the soft vulnerability of her sister Madeline and her quietly brutal Polish father; the doddering, sometimes violent nuns of Our Lady of Assumption; Marisol Lewis from the projects by the creek; and Johnna Latrotta, the tough-as-nails Italian dance-school teacher who offered a slim chance for escape to every young Chelsea girl in tulle and tap shoes. Told in Tea's trademark loose-tongued, lyrical style, this memoir both celebrates and annihilates one girl's tightrope walk out of a working-class slum and the lessons she carries with her. With wry humor and a hard-fought wisdom, Tea limns the extravagant peril of a dramatic adolescence with the private, catastrophic secret harbored within the walls of her family's home-a secret that threatens to destroy her family forever.… (more)
User reviews
Though it's difficult to get through (it's taken me almost a year) I think The Chelsea Whistle offers an extremely valuable narrative about the emotional, physical and psychological effects of abuse. Whether you've experienced some form of sexual/emotional abuse or are trying to understand someone who has, this book offers an inside view into the mind of someone who can't believe it at first, and when she finally does is not believed.