Tattoos on the heart
2010
- christian life
- church work with juvenile delinquents
- anecdotes
- gangs
- christian life, anecdotes
- nyt:relationships=2014-09-07
- biography & autobiography / personal memoirs
- self-help / motivational & inspirational
- social science / sociology
- church work
The story
Father Boyle started Homeboy Industries nearly 20 years ago, which has served members of more than half of the gangs in Los Angeles. This collection presents parables about kinship and the sacredness of life drawn from Boyle's years of working with gangs.
What it’s like
Warm, plainspoken prose with the feel of a long conversation at a kitchen table: short vignettes, each one a few pages, that move from humor to ache and back again. The voice is conversational and funny, with a Los Angeles street-level grit underneath, and the sensory world is the one of a community office, a bakery, a tattoo-parlor waiting room and the bruised, sun-hard streets of east LA, described through the people who live there rather than through scenery. Vibe: tender, unsentimental hope, the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud and then sit quietly with your coffee going cold. It suits a slow weekend morning, a bedside read in short sittings, or a gap between busy days when you want something that restores rather than pushes. Pacing is episodic and unhurried, with each anecdote closing on a small turn of grace. The emotional register stays gentle even when the stories touch on gang violence, prison, addiction and death, which appear as recollection rather than graphic scene; there is no gore, and violence is mentioned plainly and briefly. Its people are young men and women who are slowly seen and welcomed by the author, and the arc is one of accumulating trust. Best for readers who want faith-inflected, humane stories about second chances, and for anyone drawn to memoir that treats marginal lives with dignity and humor.
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