Because I Am Furniture

Publishers Weekly

Chaltas's novel of poems marks an intensely powerful debut. Anke and her older siblings, Darren and Yaicha, may appear typical teenagers in public, but their home life is dominated by their father. Though he is verbally, physically and sexually abusive to her brother and sister, Anke seems beyond his notice ("with a sick/ acidic/ burbling/ bile/ i want what they have/ as horrible/ curdling/ vile/ as it is/ darren and yaicha/ get more/ than/ me"). The distance between the family members-separated by their silence-is palpable, as is Anke's growing sense of strength, partly due to her participation in volleyball at school ("My lungs are claiming expanding territory./ This is my voice./ This is MY BALL"). Though the pace is quick, tension builds slowly, almost agonizingly, as acts of abuse collect (a large bruise glimpsed on Darren's torso, muffled sounds from Yaicha's room that can't be tuned out). Readers will recognize the inevitability of an explosive confrontation, but the particulars will still shock. Incendiary, devastating, yet-in total-offering empowerment and hope, Chaltas's poems leave an indelible mark. Ages 12-up. (Apr.)

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Children's Literature - Uma Krishnaswami

In this debut free verse novel, fourteen-year-old Anke is witness to the abuse her father enacts on other family members. Somehow, he focuses his violence not on Anke but on her brother and sister. He ignores Anke, leaving her at once lucky and neglected. This is a brave first novel, tackling complex and difficult material. Some of the free verse is dense and packed with meaning. Some is flat and almost toneless. This unevenness credibly echoes the feelings of the main character. A few objects that serve as emotional markers (e.g., the chair) are beautifully planted and spotlighted just enough that we understand their significance in the end, in a way that is at once surprising and inevitable. Anke holds patchy memories of "a time/ of kindness" which along the way find reinforcement. For the most part, Dad comes across as a villain without nuance. He seems one-dimensionally evil, just as Mom seems a victim frozen in a singular cowering stance. While this depiction of secondary characters is true to Anke's worldview, it does feel a little too skeletal at times. Victimhood and suffering are both dense and complicated, and the first-person voice that could lead us deep into the roots of both is here at times overly restrained. Anke trips a little too easily from the darkest revelations of family secrets to her redemption through volleyball. The reversals that accompany her redemption could be better earned. Even so, this is a novel with heart by a writer worth watching. Reviewer: Uma Krishnaswami

School Library Journal

Gr 7 Up

Anke, a high school freshman, is the only one of her siblings to escape her father's physical or sexual abuse as her mother cowers in denial. Anke is relieved, guilt-ridden, and jealous, as he hardly acknowledges her existence. She joins the volleyball team against his wishes. As she learns to make herself heard on the court, she builds the courage to out her father's abuses. While the first 10 poems or so of this novel in verse are maudlin and overwritten, Chaltas settles mercifully into subtler character development. The story picks up pace in tandem, and even reluctant readers will plow through it as moderate tension builds. Though her arc from mouse to lion is predictable, Anke's narrative and voice are increasingly affecting. Few of the poems here are legitimately poetic, but several hit in both rhythm and emotion. The verse in which Anke measures the plausibility of living in the bathroom is among the best-all show and no tell. A lack of background details leaves readers as untethered as the narrator, and the story feels generic instead of stark. Anke's father and mother are completely without pathos, unilaterally monstrous and meek, respectively. Because I Am Furniture is an uneven though occasionally moving addition to the genre.-Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library

Kirkus Reviews

Free verse, sometimes piquant and sometimes plain, describes very short scenes about a ninth grader with an abusive father. He beats her brother, beats and rapes her sister, but ignores Anke, invisible like "furniture." She knows she's lucky, yet she aches with jealousy for the attention. Anke narrates in first person, her brief verses denser than they first appear: Her father, after hitting her brother, "pick[s] up his reasons and his plate" to leave the room; her sister's voice is "flat as mud at low tide." Despite the copious white space, the verse pacing is slow and halting from Anke's years of living in silence. Two gentle interactions with boys mitigate her primary sorrow. This family of "live-in victims" never resists or rebels until Anke-strengthened by a powerful season on the school volleyball team-confronts her father for attempting to rape a schoolmate whom Anke doesn't even like. He smashes a chair over her, breaking her leg, but the explosion prompts his expulsion from the family. A harder read than it seems, but worth it. (Fiction. YA)