Push

In the beginning of "Push" it starts out with telling the story of how Precious had her first child at the age of twelve.  The fact that she was twelve was the first shocker in the book.  It turned out that the father of her child was her own father, and he had been raping her for years.  Her mother would also beat her all the time and treat her like a slave around the house.  Due to the harsh nature of her upbringing she wound up very uneducated and was far behind her class at the age of sixteen.  All of these events are supposed to show the reader the harsh reality of the lives of some people who are born into poverty and deprived.  Precious is supposed to represent everyone who were abused and left uneducated and eventually left to become almost nothing in the eyes of the world.  Because of the way Precious was raised, and because of the cruelty she was shown as a child she herself became cruel and mean to the people around her.  She said that in school people would yell at her and call her names because she was so tall and so big.  She grew a distaste for most of the people in her life simply because no one had ever shown her compassion.  She also had a very low self-esteem and this is shown through her when she talks about how she knows she's nothing, and she agreed when people called her stupid.  Frankly she never thought she would amount to anything because nobody ever told her she could be anything if she tried.  Precious basically grew up with all of the wrong morals and wasn't even sure of what was right or wrong.  Not only did she not know how to treat other people, she also did not know how it felt to be treated with sympathy.  During her first pregnancy, a doctor was acting very nicely towards her and she said, "No man was never nice like that to me before."  It is crazy to think that the first time anyone was nice to her before was by a man who was only doing his job.  This captures how deprived she was as a child and how warped her view on the world must have been.  In the very beginning she seems like she is a tough bully of some sort, but in reality she only acted that way due to her appearance.  She was actually a sensitive girl who did not know what to make of the things that had happened to her in her life.  Precious is one of the many abused victims of society who are lost because of their mistreatment, but she is also one who understands she is lost and wants to find her way.