Delacroix assidulously took sketchbook and paints onto the streets to capture his Orient. The book is written in a light, conversational style which lends itself particularly well to the heroine's frequent attempts to get herself back on the straight and narrow.Although How Stella Got Her Groove Back could benefit from a more complex plot, it is a pleasant, undemanding tale of emotional awakening.`A little gentler on the G-String, Mr Smith': Pasha and Bayadere from the camera of the early Victorian photographer, Roger Fenton. Suddenly, all the things she has previously valued - security, financial success, control - seem to lose their allure as she finds herself falling for a 20-year-old Jamaican man. She has a son, Quincy, she adores, a toned and youthful body, and a hobby designing original pieces of furniture. In fact, she hardly has time to notice that the one thing she lacks is a meaningful relationship.This all changes when a trip to Jamaica sends her reeling. She has a great job, a beautiful apartment with quirky colour scheme and leather flooring. Hence the vomit.A tendency towards blandness in Terry McMillan's How Stella Got her Groove Back was a life-saver after Sapphire's book.

This is a tale of how a successful, 42-year-old black financial analyst called Stella Payne turns her world around As the book begins, Stella's life is shown as near-complete. The father's delight in his daughter and her mother's abuse are so vile that you are left with the feeling that you have been forced to watch what took place. But perhaps that's the point: that no-one wants to have to face up to, or take responsibility for, things that have gone this wrong. At times, Push made me wonder whether it was right to convert such terrible personal tragedy into a literary product. Just when things look as though they couldn't get any worse, Precious discovers that her father has infected her with the HIV virus.The author teaches creative writing and poetry in New York City and has said that Precious's life is the kind of story that is familiar to her through her work with teenagers. To let the world know that such things go on? To show how completely vulnerable children are to their parents' desire to damage them? To make a point about hope - that some kind of sanity can be salvaged from even the most vile beginnings? The book certainly forces one to consider these questions, all of which seem valid and worthy and yet somehow the relentless scale of the tragedy and the explicit details of the sexual suffering are too much. I wondered, while reading, what exactly the point of committing all this horror to paper was.