Rogers' book is about language, literacies, ideologies, and power in family literacy practices and how these interplay paradoxically to impact on individuals' literate view of themselves and on their relationships to institutions such as school. Her critical ethnographic study centers around a mother and daughter in an urban African American family labeled as low income and low literate. They negotiate language and literacy in their home and community “proficiently, critically and strategically” (p. xiii), but the effect of schooled literacy leads them to view themselves as literate failures. Rogers' fine-tuned critical analysis illuminates how schooled literacy is embedded within the primary discourse of home and how it is both embodied and resisted through their literacy work and their identities as a mother and an adolescent who evoke conflicting subjectivities.
The particular strengths of Rogers' book are in the exploration and critique of the intersection of linguistic anthropology and critical discourse studies and in the detailed explanation of her theoretical framework and methodological approaches. She successfully argues the need for a reflexive ethnographic approach combined with critical discourse analysis (CDA), rather than CDA alone, in order to reveal power behind discourse as well as power in discourse, thereby going beyond the analyzed institutional moment, such as a school meeting. This approach allows her to take account of the mother's and daughter's complex literate identities, the history of their participation within the institution of school, and the sets of deficit assumptions they learned about themselves along the way, which have led them to bow to the ideology of the dominant institution.
The importance of this book is in laying bare the paradox of literacy (i.e., why literacy is often not what it seems or promises to be, why social resources cannot be turned into social capital in people's lives). Clear implications for research, policy, and practice relate to the literacy needs of children and families. Rogers powerfully demonstrates the injustice of holding up the so-called right kind of literacy as the measure of competence and success in life, thereby severely hindering people's ability to increase control of their own social circumstances.
