GATHER ME offers a memoir interwoven with Glory Edim’s chosen life focus on the power of books, a discovery that has brought her public recognition and personal satisfaction.

The daughter of parents who fled Nigeria after the Biafran War, Edim became a caregiver to her brothers as a child in poverty-ridden circumstances. Her father went back to Africa where she lived briefly. Upon her return to the US, her mother found a new man known as “uncle” who treated her with scorn. Reading became her solace, with comfort in such works as ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY by Mildred D. Taylor. Its heroine, Cassie, is Black and performs chores similar to Edim’s. Much the same solace was evinced by Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN, which centers on Jo March, who, like Cassie, is “in peril and somehow made it out.”

"GATHER ME should be added to the library of anyone genuinely drawn to reading as a source of strength and support. It also would make fine fodder for classroom discussion and individual contemplation."

Thus began the formation of a template that would shape Edim’s life from that phase to the present day. She read books to find identity, doing as much research as possible on their authors. Zora Neale Hurston became one of the examples that she would follow as a child. Maya Angelou was such a dynamic figure for Edim that at age 18, she spoke out daringly in disagreement with a teacher who had criticized Angelou’s “grammar.”

One of Edim’s greatest achievements was scoring high on the SAT exams. She would attend college despite having to care constantly for her younger siblings and, later, for her mother, who sank into a deep depression. Edim’s female friends in college were a mainstay, and a boyfriend gifted her a T-shirt that altered the course of her life. She established a reader’s cohort, the Well-Read Black Girl Book Club, in which members communicate with one another about books that have special impact on their thinking, a connection that she consciously has been pursuing since childhood.

An award-winning author, Edim arrays her memories deftly from her life’s early deprivations and her eventual triumphs described with a book and an author poised silently in the background to spur her forward. Each chapter is dedicated to such literary lights as Alice Walker, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison and William Shakespeare. Edim concludes with a message, perhaps a dedication, to her son Zikomo, encouraging him to read, build his vocabulary and come to understand that words carry truth.

GATHER ME should be added to the library of anyone genuinely drawn to reading as a source of strength and support. It also would make fine fodder for classroom discussion and individual contemplation.