Rating: 
Summary: A brutally beautiful book.
Review: Leroy's metaphors ring true without exception, not merely detailing images but nailing their meaning. The pacing shows good editing and good storytelling, never dawdling except to lay out how relentless are the sequences of growing up. Leroy indulges in descriptions of ordinary things from glowing doorbells to stray dogs but he never gives in to sentimentalism.
Some of these Amazon reviewers sound like they've never read other accounts of child abuse. Writers such as Dorothy Allison in Bastard Out of Carolina and Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings have confessed secrets about how children yield to abuse and have itemized the surcharges of the strength it gives them. But Leroy stands out in the completeness of his childhood perspective and in the depth of his understanding the characters around him. He's trying to impress us not with the facts, which are indeed horrible, but with their significance. The reviewer who says the character Jeremiah is always looking for love and never finding it is on target but has oversimplified the problem. Leroy asks how to untangle loving from wanting to be loved. (Which is the same identity problem that the biblical Jeremiah confronts in the verse taken for the title.) You can relate to this problem even if it hasn't taken you so far towards your fears as it has Jeremiah. Leroy has loads to tell. Buy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Brutal Crap.
Review: Maybe I'm just totally desensitized. Maybe the fact that I lived through some shocking abuse myself for my entire childhood makes me feel less than compassionate toward LeRoy. As he continues to publish, we get the feeling that he just needs some major psycho-therapy, not that he's the one to watch. Personally, I don't feel comfortable with older people who write as poorly as he does calling him the voice of my generation. The sentences are incredibly straightforward, to agree with one reviewer, but they're watery. LeRoy has a way of alienating readers from his memories instead of pulling them in. (Peas falling out of his clothes? I sat there racking my brain for some intelligent symbolism going on, but I gave up.) This is just a collection of undeveloped memories. It's like looking at someone's film negatives instead of looking at the pictures themselves. It's not shocking, though, and it's hardly brutal. If you want brutal, go volunteer a few hours at your local women's shelter. If that's what you're after- brutal honesty about issues of abuse, go get it straight from the sources, from people who won't doll it up and hack it into pieces to make a buck off of it. When LeRoy starts writing from the heart, I'll start reading him again.
Rating:
Summary: Different, disturbing, amusing, sad and real
Review: So many emotions one feels when reading these stories.
Rating: 
Summary: how meat is met (how raw can product be?)
Review: Some of this is just lazy. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely some difficult spots in this poorly edited collection, but nothing that challenging or cutting-edge. Quote unqote. Media provides such banal tags. A self-confessed hustler always knows how he is coming across.
Rating:
Summary: Wasted talent
Review: The arc of this story is pretty simple. We meet the protagonist as a 4 year old, newly taken from loving, competent foster parents by an 18 year old, trash talking and abusive hussy, his biological mother. From there, the story plummets gradually downward. This child is exposed to every manner of abuse from name calling to direct physical violence (being hit in the head with a rock at close range) all the way to ritual sexual abuse by older men who treat him like a female sex toy. Along the way, we read about several brief but debilitating stays with Grandma and Grandpa. They too are cruel and abusive, although their abuse is done in the name of God and liberal mention is made of the Biblical edict to no spare the rod when rearing a child. The boy's mother is mentally ill. This illness manifests itself in both the cruelty to her child and a series of empty, abusive relationships with working class slobs who without exception share their cruelty with the little boy and shower him with sexual and physical abuse. The mother also indulges in bizarre, confusing behavior. She has horrific delusions about the world and the people in it. Time and again, her son bears the brunt of her delusions. The final chapter of this novel jumps between two horrific scenes. In one story line, our Hero is bent over a table by a Grocery store manager and whipped for shop lifting under the approving gaze of his mother. The other scene, meant to shock, is downright cartoonish. Our boy, now 15 (possibly a little younger) pays an Obese Asian Sadist $100 to ritually torture him with a switchblade, a belt and a variety of S&M toys and tools. We learn that over the years words like "Evil" "Pig" and "Whore" have been carved into his body. The book fails because by this point of maximum degradation, we no longer care about the boy. We'd like for his suffering to end, he is after all introduced to us as an innocent 4 year old, but we know that the author is not going to end this monotonous litany of abuse end with anything but abject horror. There is no suspense, no sympathy and no emotional investment in these characters. It's 247 pages of filth. Along the way he manages to vilify fundamentalist Christians (an easy target) truck drivers (not much harder to do), teen mothers and the mentally ill. Mr. Leroy has some skill. His sentences are straight forward and carry some emotional heft. He gets his details right and for the first 50 pages or so the deftness of his style managed to carry my interest. But at this point, he doesn't seem to have much to say other than a piercing scream at the whole world that everyone is wicked and filled with malfeasance and despair. His voice might be powerful one day, but he really needs to have something meaningful to articulate before he sets out on another novel. Right now, he's just wasting his talent and the time of his readers.
Rating:
Summary: A stunning, horrible, powerful, beautiful work
Review: The other reviewers here are right on target. This is a beautiful, horrible book. It is a tale of a child seeking love and finding everything but. I suspect it is an autobiography. If 1/10 of the events described here actually happened to J. T. Leroy, my heart and soul ache for him. This is a vivid portrait of the sins of righteousness (organized religion and bible believers will NOT recommend this book); abuse of every genre (drug, sexual, child, physical, mental, incest, institutional, parental, grand-parental, etc.); the joys and twisted horrors of sex. The work is billed as "stories" but it reads like a novel, each tale painting a bleaker and more tragic portrait of the narrator. I recommend this book for a variety of reasons: the paradoxical beauty of the writing; the drama, horror, trauma, tragedy, and emotion of its story; and the fact that like all great works of literature, it will touch you deeply. I spent the day today reading this book. It is something that will play and replay in my mind for a long, long time. I'm boggled by the fact that a teenager wrote these stories, and I hope that cliches like "the resiliency of the human spirit" hold true for J. T. Leroy.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling - like a moth drawn to a flame
Review: The words hit us in our core. There is no gentleness here. Yet, there is a poignant yearning for what could have been, the 'what if' world. The author is able to convey the way abuse takes over one's core, provides the center to being and compels us to relive it throughout our lives. We rewrite our narrative with each subsequent relationship for reality is internalized and needs to be validated so that one can feel. A truly remarkable book. Not for the faint of heart.
Rating:
Summary: My heart as the ceiling, above all
Review: These interconnected stories can be read as separate entities, or as a mosaic of the painful, crackling life of a boy searching. The emotions and the story details are literally bursting through each page, crammed in between the words and sentences, and the overall effect is an intoxicating disturbance which leaves the reader breathless, bereft, and strangely fulfilled. The book's journey ends with "Natoma Street", where the boy discovering the pleasure of pain, and rethreads his journey into a new shape. This is a book to believe in. I'd read "Sarah" last year, and now I realize that I misjudged it, and I need to read it again. With elements of Dennis Cooper, Gregg Araki, Scott Heim, and Tom Woolley, and with a hearty dose of skewed whimsy, J. T. LeRoy is the hurricane rattling the windows of mediocre fiction.
Rating:
Summary: some people are just evil
Review: This book rips your heart out.
Told from the perspective of the protagonist, a little boy ripped from the foster family who loves him by his damaged, abusive drug addicted prostitute mother, this book gives a startling description of child abuse and it's effect on the victim.
It has it's funny moments, notably the part where the little boy is convinced that his mother is about to be trapped in a nudie poster, while she's turning a trick in the next room, but is mostly disturbing.
I found myself alternately filled with rage and on the verge of tears, as I read each moment of abuse against this child and his reaction to it.
Only in the end, do you get a glimpse of the lasting damage done to this child.
Rating:
Summary: Totally unrealistic
Review: This book treats a boy like he is an object. What trash. And to think that this really goes on the world? Very unrealistic! To treat a boy like that --a handsome one as well--- is totally nonsense and unrealistic. I really doubt that a woman would do this to her son! Her son?! I found the book vulger, sado-maschoistic and unrealistic. I really doubt that a boy can be treated that way. This is trash!!!!!
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