stunning. exquisite. a must read.

shane's poetic prose is absolutely soul crushing.

tysm to netgalley for this rockin arc

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the gifted e-book!

I actually also had a copy of the audiobook, so that's how I read this one. I was very intrigued by the premise and thought it would be more true crime style. However, it was more stream of consciousness and poetic in style. Which was beautiful, just not what I was expecting.

Overall, I think this is a great memoir, but the style just wasn't for me.

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun was the most unique memoir I have read by a longer shot. McCrae's background as an accomplished poet radiates from page one. McCrae's writing style is very stream of consciousness and he is very forthcoming in demonstrating that he doesn't accept any of his memories as 100% reliable or factual but rather as bits and pieces that he tries to weave together. He accepts that childhood memories are difficult to have full confidence in, and that, in addition, his trauma impacts his recall. This memoir a bit difficult for me to follow. However, I see that as part of the uniqueness of this memoir. It seems to be a tool McCrae is using to connect with the reader. McCrae himself seems to struggle to piece together what he remembers and find any closure to the trauma he experienced. Having a similar feeling allows us to develop some empathy for what he has gone through.

I was excited to read McCrae's memoir - memoirs by poets are often lyrical and beautifully written. Unfortunately, I did not find that to be the case here. The book is written with a lot of metaphors and long, sometimes illogical, run-on sentences. Sometimes these metaphors convey a clear point, but at other times I found them too obtuse to decipher. While I got whiffs of McCrae's emotions, there is little in the way of a concrete story, so I finished the book with many questions unanswered. In particular, I wanted to learn more about McCrae's relationship with his Black father who he was kidnapped from, but he is barely mentioned at all. McCrae is also honest about the fact that much of his past is a mystery that he cannot clearly remember, so many of his "memories" are written with disclaimers (maybe this happened, maybe I was ten, maybe this reader should have given up on this book and not finished it). This one fell sadly short for me.

I started out liking this book but found the style (that attempted to mimic a memory with wholes in it) irritating. The author couldn’t remember much so I felt kept at arms length. It was also very repetitive and I didn’t care much for that either.

DNF at 27% Shane McCrae has an important story, but I just could not get into this one. I didn't like the writing style. It’s short, but very repetitive. I will not be posting my feedback.

Some of the stories were interesting but the memoir felt all over the place and redundant a lot of the time. I wonder what his poetry is like because this looks like he's not used to writing longer works.

It’s so hard to rate a memoir as it’s someone’s personal experience. McCrae’s story is harrowing and I can’t begin to fathom the toll it took on him. My heart broke reading about his grandparents trying to teach him to hate not only his father, but himself as well.

The only thing that kept this from being a 5 star memoir is that it ended at an odd point. I wanted to know more about what happened to McCrae. We spend so much time leading up to him contacting his father and then see very little of how the situation revolved. That said, I can understand if that is perhaps too personal to be shared.

All in all, this was well written, moving, and a look into racism which clearly still exists in this country.

In his memoir, award winning poet Shane McCrae reflects upon a singular traumatic event: his brazen kidnapping by his maternal grandparents. “It’s like living for 40 years as a murdered person, and then realizing that you’re dead.” At the age of three and without his father’s permission, his white grandparents took him from Oregon to Texas, after a weekend visit. It was years before Shane discovered two truths. His black father had not abandoned him as his grandparents repeatedly said. And his mother had been threatened. If she made mention of Shane's whereabouts, she would never see him again.
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping is Shane’s attempt to piece together his childhood. Because trauma reshapes episodic memory, Shane admits his recollection is sometimes vague and indefinite. What he is clear about is the physical and psychological abuse he endured. His grandparents sustained a relentless attack of microaggressions, racism, and disdain for black culture, black identity, black appearance, and black history. It created within Shane powerlessness, racial illegitimacy, and rage. While he always knew he was black, he thought there was something wrong with being black. Why else would his grandmother have written “white” on his birth certificate? (His mother was too spent from the labor to fill out forms).
Life with his grandfather was violent. “My grandfather hit me so hard and with such anger my grandmother thought he would kill me.” While Shane’s Nazi-loving six-times married grandmother didn’t strike him she passionately agreed that black identity was fraudulent and needed to be erased.
Which made me wonder. How did such a miserable childhood of trauma and violence create such a prolific poet, a writer who was the finalist for the National Book Award. Shane wasn’t a writing kind of kid, the kind that keeps journals and writes stories in the dark. Between beatings he hung out with his friends and brooded. Seemingly no one identified his talent. Is talent honed like this, settling in pores, crowding out damage, glistening as it sits in a wound. Having your physical body tortured and having your culture defiled relentlessly, does that trigger the poet’s soul?
Pulling the Chariot of Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping is a coming-of-age story even as it is a kidnapping story. As the book winds through Shane’s childhood the kidnapping narrative takes on deep meaning. Once when he was six years old Shane and a new friend (no name given) who he only met the day before entered into a pact. They would break into the houses of neighbors, those who left the door unlocked. Criminality was something exciting and for Shane it was a misguided attempt to find his way back to his father, but first Shane had to break into his new friend’s house. Which he did. The friend was asleep, and Shane instinctively knew he didn’t belong. He felt trapped and ran out the window. His grandparents, who were awake when he returned, hadn’t called the police when they noticed him missing. They couldn’t. After all, Shane was a victim of a crime: a kidnapping.
What struck me the most about his retelling of this passage was his level of consciousness at the age of six. He knew he didn’t belong. Not just in his friend’s home. But within his grandparents' racist bubble. And the white world he was dropped into. I was suddenly aware that more than a kidnapping story, Shane McCrae’s memoir is also a hate crime story. Or perhaps, all kidnappings are hate crime stories. His grandfather in particular hated what black meant in American culture and tried to rescue Shane from its complexities by cutting it into shreds without considering the consequence to Shane, a boy who was never celebrated, a boy whose racial identity was condemned. There wasn’t an ounce of black joy in his young life. Worse, he was cut off from those who looked like him and perhaps shared the same feelings, people who could have been aspirational.
Shane McCrae is simply a stunning writer. His prose is masterful. Like when describing himself and his family. “When I was a child, whiteness and blackness weren’t facts about me, whiteness was a wheat field I stood in; blackness was a pit somewhere in the field, hidden by the somehow taller stalks growing from it.”
He writes his own story as if childhood is timeless. In a span of a few pages, he is a seven-year-old watching sideways rain and then he’s a kindergartener and then an acne-faced teenager. McCrae offers as a statement of fact “Never as a child did I fantasize someone would save me from my grandparents.” And so here we are, an attempt by Shane McCrae to make sense of what happened to him, the complexity of it, the crime of it, the hatred of it, the ugly violence of it.
Even so, his longing for his father and racial understanding is the heart of his bittersweet tale of life, love and loathing. story. As he takes us with him along on the ride, the agony and the ecstasy, the pain, and the acceptance while serenading us with his beautiful prose, we come to admire and respect how talented he is, and how resilient. He is, as Toni Morrison wrote in her tour de force novel Beloved, his best thing.

great book wow. recommend having nothing else to do but read for a day or 2. the character development was great as as well as the plot.

A unique autobiographical work, this book is subtitled A Memoir of a Kidnapping. The kidnap victim is the author himself at age 3. The kidnappers are his grandparents, his mother’s parents. The writing meanders and muses as Shane teies to make sense of the life he is inserted into, while eventually attempting to locate and return to his father. The book will dismay some and tiych the hearts of others. A unique autobiographical work.

I'm giving up on this one at 45%, and I'm SO SAD ABOUT IT. Perhaps it's my fault for not reading more about this author, or this novel. I thought the premise would be interesting and so I requested it. I wanted to learn more about this man kidnapped by his racist grandparents and his story.

Shane McCrae is a poet. I am sure this works amazingly for his poetry. However, I don't think it works in this memoir. Some people will like the style. I personally found it very meandering and difficult to follow in this format - especially when I wanted to read facts about his story. I feel like this was probably very healing to write personally - but very un-engaging for anybody outside of his headspace. At 45% I feel like I have so little a sense of him, of his family, of his life, that I may as well have not opened the book at all. Because of this I'm choosing not to rate the book, as I don't feel I can give an accurate assessment, but keep in mind the poetic nature of this book if you do pick it up. Read a sample ahead of time.

The contents of this memoir didn’t seem to line up with the attention grabbing title. One of the reasons may be that the author is a poet. He uses the poetic device of repetition throughout this memoir. I hybrid read this book so as I listened to it, I would think did I just hear that? Then as I read the text, I kept going backwards to see if I had just read a sentence that was repeated. I am a poetry fan so I recognized what the author was doing. It didn’t seem to work in this compelling story. I wanted to get the elements of memoir: details, emotions, locations, people. With the repetition, the memoir essentials got lost. The majority of the memoir, I was frustrated reading it but I am intrigued if the author will write a follow up to share the reconnections he makes at the end of this memoir.

A truly stunning book about trying to remember a past that was deliberately altered and reconcile that past with who they have become today and just how being kidnapped and lied to for years fits into all of it overall. It is just so much at times that I could do nothing but weep for this man who just wants the truth and honestly wants more memories that are stable and not the flitflitflit that they are [due to how he was raised and the lies he was told and all the moving his grandparent did to stay ahead of the game].

I have read some reviews that disparage the telling of the story [the poetic style, the repetitiveness, the "trying to be true crime" {I'M SORRY, but is kidnapping of a CHILD just so they aren't raised by a black father NOT TRUE CRIME ENOUGH FOR YOU?? SMH} ] and all I can say to that is...you all have totally MISSED the meaning and message of this book and clearly it must be wonderful to have perfect memories from your perfect childhood. *EYEROLL* This book is just so much more than some people are giving it credit for and I cannot state that loudly enough. I can only hope that the author finds the peace he is looking for and basks in the love he has found and revels in now. I would read anything he writes.

Thank you to NetGalley, Shane McCrae, and Scribner for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Let's see if I can describe my love/hate relationship with this book.

Initially, I was super intrigued by the author's story. As I began reading, I noticed the writing style was unusual, but I didn't mind it because it made me feel like I was sitting next to the author and he was talking through his story... kind of like when an elderly family member is telling you a story about something that happened to them years ago and they keep having to backtrack a bit to fill in some things they missed as they come to mind. I found it endearing.

About halfway through the book, unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, that same writing style began to slowly drive me mad. The author continued backtracking to fill in details but then would backtrack again and change all the details he'd shared in a few pages before. Then, he'd backtrack once more, admitting that he didn't remember what really happened that day. I, too, am one of those people whose childhood memories play like gifs in my mind, but why publish a memoir about them then?

By the end, I felt like I still knew very little of the author's story. I got the sense that this memoir had been written for the author's own coping, like a journal, not meant for an audience. Simultaneously, though, I felt like he'd purposefully blocked the audience out of the heart of his story by not digging into the details. Eventually, I began skimming through all the gibberish and endless skateboarding terminology trying to pull out whatever bits of the story the author had decided to include.

Thank you NetGalley and Scribner for allowing me early access to the ARC ebook edition of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

The memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, by Shane McCrae, takes a journey through the life of a child who was kidnapped by his grandparents when he was three years old. His mother was white, his father was black, and his grandparents were steeped in prejudice. They took him to Texas in an effort to hide his blackness from him. His mother becomes a very minor figure in his story, an infrequent visitor until he lives with her for a short time as a teenager. Her claim is that if she told him his true story, her parents would never allow her to see him again.

The grandparents begin with the lie that his father abandoned him and build a story from there. As he analyzes their action from a point of maturity, he writes, “For the safety of everyone involved in the kidnapping, least of all the boy’s safety, he must never stop telling the story. The long work of the kidnapping is turning the boy into a machine for protecting his kidnappers.” The book is his effort to tell that story. The years after his abduction are told from Shane’s faulty memory.

A child at three, kidnapped and reconstructed; a boy, growing up beaten by his grandfather for any infraction; a teenager, moved on a seeming whim from one place to another – it is no wonder that times and places intermingle randomly. Toward the end, he asks the question, “Who are you if you can’t be sure when and for how long you lived anywhere?”

Shane had a couple of things going for him. He scored well above average on standardized tests even as he failed at school, and he stumbled into poetry. Then his love of skateboarding followed him from place to place and made friends for him.

If you have ever wondered what happened in news accounts to children who were abducted and placed in a whole new life, this book will give you the picture of one.

I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read and review this book. I am giving an unbiased review in return.

I had to DNF this memoir. I was very intrigued by the premise of poetic prose telling the intense story of a black boy being kidnapped by his white grandparents as a child. I got about 62% of the way through McCrae's story before I decided that I was not doing it any justice by continuing to read. McCrae writes with a distinct voice of deeply poetic prose that almost becomes...gibberish at times. I felt myself struggling to understand what was being said in simple sentences because they ran on for entire pages in the name of "poetry." There were a handful of meaningful quotes and phrases that stuck out to me, but the majority of the text felt like unedited rambling. I am upset by this because I was very genuinely interested in learning Shane McCrae's story and how it has affected him as an adult. I was wholly unable to do that because of the writing style, and it ultimately led me to not finish the memoir as I was not enjoying it nor giving it the respect it deserves.

Many other readers have said that other works by this author are wonderful and I would be interested in giving them another chance, but this fell incredibly flat for me. DNF, and no rating out of respect for the author's personal story and stake in this event.

Special thanks to Scribner Books and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

I appreciate that the author is a poet but this was a little too poetic for me. I just kept putting it down. The story was too repetitive for me and because of the prose and long chapters, I often felt I was confused and lost interest.

I could not in my right mind finish this book. Very sorry. I'm sure poetry lovers will have a very different opinion.

This is an excellent memoir that recounts the experience of poet Shane McCrae being kidnapped by his racist grandparents. McCrae was born to a White mother and a Black father. His maternal grandparents wanted to shelter him from blackness to such a degree that they kidnapped him from his father's home when the author was three years old. Of course, trauma ensues because not only are his abductors racist, but his grandfather is also physically abusive.

The memoir is both an attempt to remember his personal history and to discover his father. McCrae's writing style embodies his efforts to remember as he writes a rhythmic prose that at one moment remembers, and then, at the next moment, un-remembers. Like memoirist Annie Ernaux, the writer forces us to question what it is we actually remember.

Similar to the son of Apollo, Phaeton, McCrae is burdened with pulling a chariot to the sun in his quest to find his father. Perhaps symbolically McCrae rides a chariot; in real life he rode a skateboard. I emphasize that because I think, given the details about skating at the end of the book, skaters will enjoy this book as well.

It's an intriguing read!

DNFed at 35%
Pub Date: Aug. 1st

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was one of my highly anticipated books this year, as Shane’s story is sad, yet intriguing. Shane was kidnapped when he was three years old by his white maternal grandparents from his Black father and was manipulated, beaten, and made to feel shame about his Blackness for years.
I really do wish that I could have kept reading to find out the rest of Shane’s journey back to his father, but the writing was too much for me to continue. There were run-on sentences galore, and it seemed like it was an unedited transcript of an audio recording of past recollections. While I did appreciate the approach of the battle between memories, implanted memories, misremembering of events, and fuzzy recollections, there was a lot of repetition and irrelevant details.
It’s possible that this was written too much in a poetic style for my taste, and it might be better as an audiobook, which is also not my thing, so if either of these styles/formats speaks to you, please check out this book (and then tell me about it)!

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