Project Girl

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Posted on: 30th Jun 2014

Project Girl
By Janet McDonald
Project Girl is a personal memoir about a young black woman's struggles with growing up in the rough Farragut Houses projects in Brooklyn, battling with drug abuse, and committing crimes, while at the same time, competing academically with far more privileged white Ivy League school students to achieve her dreams of success, social acceptance, self-realization, and happiness.

It tells of the spectacular failures and unlikely comebacks of a ghetto kid whose academic talent opens doors onto a world of private schools, rich classmates, and plum jobs.

Project Girl is McDonald's story of her divided life and terrible battle to reconcile the contrasting worlds black ghetto life and white academic and corporate society.

Frank McCourt, Irish-American teacher and writer best known for his 1996 memoir Angela's Ashes wrote that Project Girl "should be placed on all high school and college reading lists and offered to anyone looking for a book beautifully written." Project Girl was named the Los Angeles Times Best Book of 1999.

One of seven children whose parents migrated north from Alabama in the 1940s to stake their claim to some small part of the Promised Land, McDonald was the only one who found the will, means, and drive to navigate prestigious educational systems at Vasser, NYU, Cornell, and Columbia, ultimately, to obtain a law degree and practice in her field in Paris, France.

McDonald tells her story with gripping honesty, transitioning to a journal-entry format after she is cursed by a traumatic, haunting, and life-changing event. As she struggles toward wholeness, her writer's voice comes full circle. From beginning to end, we follow the heroic arc of her life experience to date, rising and falling, sinking and swimming through it all, always right by her side.

McDonald's life experience include a felony criminal conviction, hospitalization in a mental institution, consistent poor college grades, sexual assault, a profound lack of interest in the law, disdain for the legal profession, admittance to the New York State Bar, employment as a corporate attorney in a high profile New York law firm, and finally employment as a fluent French-speaking international attorney in Paris, France.

McDonald lived in Paris for most of her adult life until her death in 2007.

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