Begotten

Emily Heiderberg never imagined anything bad would happen to her. In the novel, Begotten by W. James Richardson, she will learn to be forgiving and she teaches the people around her the same thing. There are many stories involved and they all started with the tragic incident that happened to Emily when she was at a family outing. An unforseen incident that would change the lives of the Heiderberg family, as well as the whole town of Detroit.

Certainly this book is written for adults. The authour uses profanity and racial remarks, but it is necessary to tell the story in that manner. The bad language used by the characters shows their hate and anger, but also shows that some are willing to change their ways.

Richardson's method of writing is kind of hard to comprehend at first. Every chapter would start off with a new character narrarating their story. You don't know who it is until a few sentences later. The chapter starts with a character, but some chapters would have two or three nararators with a couple paragraphs each character. Sometimes it would be confusing, but once I found out who was talking, I would sometimes have to reread the paragraph from the start to understand the situatiuon. Another thing that bothered, maybe it wasn't the authour's fault, was that many quotation marks were misplaced all over the book. the first few were tolerable, but after a while it got annoying. That bothered me much and like I said, I'm not sure if it was the author or the publisher. I don't really like the style, but it's what the author used to get many stories into one.

One of the many stories in the book involves Emily Heiderberg. Misbegotten means unlawfully conceived, so it wouldn't be right to say that Emily is an

important character in this book. Emily is a teenage girl with a bright future, but the things that happen to her dims that future. During the book she tries to overcome her fears and to become herself again. Her rape causes all certain problems to arise.

Another character that is important is Hugo Heiderberg. He grew up hating all people that weren't with the idea of whites being the supreme race. He is

retired Detroit police officer and a member of the Euro-Brothers Defense Society. He was part of the "Dirty Dozen", a groups of cops that were on trial for beating a black man. He was acquitted of the charges. Freida was his wife and Johanna,Emily, and Brian were his kids. Although he was a loving family man, his background outside of the family wasn't as loving. Most of the events that happened in the story was because of Hugo's connections. His anger and hatred lead to many of the incidents that occurred

in the book as well.

Not everything is Hugo's fault. Tommy Williams, a young African-American male, is the catalyst for the events that occurred

. He was a troubled kid, involved

in drugs and violence. Looking for ways to use the money is what Tommy