A Piece of Mine by J. California Cooper

This is a short in length, long in emotion collection of short stories that my book group read recently.  We had read some lengthy and weighty books of late, including Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, and this was chosen for the sparseness of it's pages.  I found that it was a lengthy read after all though.  The ten stories cover a range of black women's experiences in a world where they are the bottom of the American caste system.  Black men in these stories see themselves as more powerful than black women.  There is a thread of poverty that runs through this as well, with women making choices because they lack funds as well as other means, but the lowest caste always has to deal with poverty unless that has been taken off the table and no longer exists.  There are children being sexually abused, there are children having children, and everything else you can imagine in these short powerful impactful stories.  This is not a short read, nor is it an easy read, but it is a very good read.