Burn Down the Ground

November 28, 2011
In her intensely readable memoir, Crews, who owns a PR company in New York City, paints a vivid portrait of an impoverished childhood in rural Texas with hearing-impaired parents, her father who’s her hero turned monster. For the family, life is so hardscrabble that at one point they have to live in the shed once home to her horse. Despite many such moments, they love their pioneering Little House days without indoor plumbing or electricity. Crews even has her own Pa Ingalls, a craftsman father who rebuilds a bridge connecting their isolated hamlet to the outside world. “In my eyes, he was Daniel Boone, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ben Franklin, and Elvis Presley all rolled into one.” But underneath her idyllic early years, as her extremely protective mother comes to reveal in pieces, her father has a ballooning dark side sparked by raging frustration and alcoholism. Arrests, womanizing, and a mysterious bruise on her mother’s cheek set the harrowing stage for Crews’s adolescence. When she is in high school, the escalating violence sets off a cataclysmic chain of events and her dad ends up in prison for attempted murder. Crews finds solace in a boyfriend, marries before she graduates, and plots her getaway from Texas and her fractured family. But she is left with conflicted memories of a man she once adored and came to fear. Finally, it’s the lingering recollections of a loving father that Crews is able to hold onto.

February 15, 2012
A New York publicist and producer's unsparing yet compassionate account of her dysfunctional childhood and the father who both charmed and victimized her family. As the hearing child of two deaf adults, Crews grew up between worlds. Her outsider status increased when she and her parents moved to Boars Head, Texas, a place that "wasn't even on the map." At first, their new life, though undeniably difficult, seemed a glorious, backwoods adventure--the perfect tonic for her father's roving eye and failing marriage. But not long after they moved from their tin-shed shelter into a mobile home, Crews began to see evidence of domestic abuse that took the form of mysterious bruises on her mother's face and inexplicably cruel behavior in her brother. Her home life continued to show signs of ugly undercurrents, yet only silence prevailed, and the author threw herself into school and a full-time job. Meanwhile, her carpenter father began losing jobs and turning to alcohol and gambling while her mother struggled to support a splintering family. When Crews was 16, she witnessed "by far the most traumatic incident I had ever experienced in my life": her father destroying the family home and brutalizing her mother. Even after she found success in her career, her past was far from behind her. At age 31, she received the shattering news that her father had stabbed his girlfriend. Rather than blame her father for his actions, however, Crews chose to embrace a more difficult truth. She, along with her own family--in collusion with a society and criminal-justice system insensitive to the needs of domestic-abuse victims--had contributed to what he had become. Poignant and unsettling.

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February 15, 2012
Talk about your unconventional upbringings. Crews, the hearing daughter of deaf parents, spent a sizable chunk of her childhood living in a tin shack in rural Texas. Her father, mother, and older brother endured periods of time without power, and Crews describes the sheer joy experienced when her father flipped a switch, and the lights finally went on. A construction worker and gifted craftsman, Crews' father also had a hot temper that became even more fiery when fueled with alcohol. Though her mother tried to shelter her from her dad's abusive behavior, Crews often bore witness to his wrath. When the author was in her 30s, her father was sentenced to two decades in prison for attempted murder. Despite his violent nature, she still loved him and visited him in jail, fearing his deafness would make him an easy target among fellow inmates. With courage and determination, Crews cleared the hurdles of her harrowing youth to become a successful New York producer. Here she renders a compelling testament to the strength of the human spirit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)