I saw this at the library and picked it up, not knowing about all the publicity, which I'm surprised I didn't know, since I try to keep abreast of all things literary. Anyway, I did have some doubts about the foster care system placing her in that home, and why they would; about how she was able to stay in that home and never be removed despite Big Mom's struggle with caring for all of these foster kids (which I didn't understand, since she got money for them); that the lady in the gray suit would be taking her to visit someone in juvenile hall (she didn't have anything else to do?); and how she seemed to effortlessly blend in with the Bloods in the park and they treat her like she's one of them. I also was disappointed with not learning how she fared in college. She touched on it a bit but not enough considering how challenging it must have been.

Anyway, it could have been fiction if she did a little bit more research to make it flow and I'm mad that it was faked. What is up with everyone faking their life stories?

This book, billed as a truthful memoir of the life of a white girl raised by a black family in the South Central LA ghetto, is not factual, but is in fact the product of "Margaret B. Jones's" very febrile imagination. For starters: White children are not placed in black foster homes; the author claimed to be of mixed American Indian - White, but not a drop of the former made it into her face; that the first thing she did with the money from her first drug sale was buy a cemetery plot; that she had graduated from the University of Oregon, and the list goes on. Was the purpose to determine how naïve the reader, and more importantly, professional reviewers are of the true conditions in the ghetto?

Lessons abound. Clearly all too many professional reviewers do not read critically, and are prone to "groupthink." Why do so many reviewers, all at the same time, think a book like "Love and Consequences" is significant; worthy of a review, and not a single ONE detects anything amiss, when virtually everything is. Why must the reading public rely on a truthful sister to reveal the true facts?

Should the average reader mourn the curtailment of book review sections in major newspapers? Clearly a better solution may be reading rationale and thoughtful reviews posted at Amazon. With the prevalence of these incidents in the publishing industry, it stands to reason that more exist, waiting to be found.

I didn't know the book was fiction until I went to review it. I'm disappointed that the author couldn't be honest about this, but the story is still good. I have a sister who lives in the Bakersfield area, who raised two African American children in grinding poverty in a very bad neighborhood. There are many things about the story that rang true from what she has told me. The question for me: does the story move us forward? I think it does. I feel more compassion for poor people and the circumstances that lead them to crime and the gang life. Maybe I'm naive, but I think that's a good thing despite the deception by the author.

This is ridiculous, anybody who been involved or even been around this life on the outside edges would be able to tell right from the beginning where she says the thing about using K's for c's. becuz they would know that C's would not be spelled with a K, but a cK. so right from the beginning it prooves that she is ignorant of what shes talkin about. c's become cK=crip killer, there is many different parts of the language that gets changed, not just c's, so if that is all she bothered to change to the "blood speak" (just typing that made me roll my eyes) then its even more ignorant becuz she couldnt even bother to find out what language really gets used n what it stands for, just uses someone elses life as a frame to make her own picture look better and thats sad.

Books like this make me sick, for real, cant people just write somethin real, or somethin fiction and admit it. you cant get away with lying like that forever. its sad also, that she robs other peoples lives, when in reality there IS many white kids as the minority in the ghetto, but it aint a myth. But people like her faking it, takes away from the reality of their situations, like its just some concept to be used for your own good and not someones actual life and suffering. What a pathetic thing to do, now being upper class and priveleged is so hard that people gotta pretend they had a different life to get acceptance?

Her use of the slang wasnt even on point, that should tell you straight up at the start what kind of suspect book you have.

This is a well written, most engaging story and it is so unfortunate that the author chose to label it as a true memoir which caused the publisher to recall it. BUT give her a chance... it should be read, not "banned"! (I chose to read it anyway because I'd heard the NPR interview with the author and was intrigued. And, I certainly was not disappointed at all in the book.)
I think the author has a real gift to tell a story with feeling. Her descriptions of events and people are indeed well crafted. She has a talent for painting pictures with words. This tale of a youth growing up in the inner city is a fascinating, believable and captivating one. And, if you "read" the book on CD, you'll be treated to not only a well-written story but a well-read one as well. It's truly a "hard to put down" book. I hope she writes more, honestly!

Memoir or Fiction it is a wonderful and interesting book. Read it and see.

I started to read this book even thought I was aware that it was not, in fact, an autobiography. I stopped after the first chapter because I felt I had been duped. Wish I could get my money back.

It's the same as hearing some peachy, pinky people say that they have to go tanning because they're "too white"...the SAME as seeing the already too worn coat of African-American culture being adorned by others who are only interested in the financial benefits (before tossing back to the Black community with no aesthetic worth).

Recently Margaret Seltzer published a "memoir," Love and Consequences, under the name of Margaret B. Jones, detailing her life growing up in the ganglands of South Central L.A. The problem with the memoir turned out to be she was from a white, affluent, middle-class family from Southern California. Since then the publisher has recalled the book and she has had heaps of scorn piled upon her. My question would be whether she really deserves such scorn. Yes, she is a liar, or more precisely a fiction writer, yet is it really so horrible that she claimed it was true. Just looking back at other famous memoirs that were not debunked as fiction, it seems hard to justify that everything contained in them is true. Take one of the biggest memoirs of the past twenty years, Angela's Ashes. While an undoubtedly well written book, one has to wonder exactly how much of it is true. Frank McCourt published his memoir when he was almost 70, yet in the book is included numerous detailed conversations from before he was even ten years old. I don't wish to hold my memory up as the standard, but I have a difficult time remembering more than vague events from the time before I was ten, yet no one accused Frank McCourt of making up conversation whole cloth, even though that is obviously what he had to resort to. It seems apparent that no memoir is strictly speaking entirely factual and I would posit that other than memoirs written by individuals about events in their very recent past history, Valerie Plame's book for instance, most are just as much fabrication and speculation as they are truth.

In a different vein I believe it's important to also ask how much responsibility a memoirist has in presenting the truth. The entire concept of the memoir is not an autobiography but rather a literary interpretation of a series of events in the person's life. As soon as the literary aspect enters the writing I believe there is already an inserted distance of fiction from fact in the text. When a memoirist writes they are not embarking on the same task that a historian or journalist sets out to achieve. When Seltzer published her book, no one was going to be hurt by reading it because every character in the novel is fictional. In this case then the fake memoir is actually less damaging than the true to life one that often involves harsh portrayals of living people. Similarly anyone that picks up a book claiming to be non-fiction should be wary to begin with. A person doesn't turn on the evening news and expect that every single piece of information is going to be absolutely correct and hence should not think about it critically. If "hard journalism" is approached in such a skeptical way then, why should a person picking up a book claiming to be true not approach it with at least a modicum of doubt. Every time I go to the grocery store I see tabloids claiming new revelations about Nostradamus's prophecies or super-intelligent mutant babies being born and presented as a fact, yet I never hear an uproar that these papers are misleading people.

The argument could be made that people deserved to be deceived to a certain extent. The reason Seltzer's book sold was essentially prurient interest in the lifestyle of gangs. The same exact thing happened with James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. He attempted to sell it as fiction to a couple dozen publishers under the genre of fiction to no avail. When he remarketed it to them as a memoir they had a bidding war for the rights to publish the book and when it was released it got great reviews, just as Seltzer's book got good reviews. When the books were revealed to be fakes, critics then turned against them and called them awful. Why is this? The story, diction, and syntactical structure remained the same. The only thing that changed was that the events hadn't happened to a real person. In that case it seems that the enjoyment of the book did not come from anything that the author wrote, but the reader's enjoyment of knowing these awful things happened to a real person. In such a case who is the worse person: the author who misrepresents his work or the reader who delights in schadenfreud? At the same time I can see why James Frey acted as he did. After having spent years writing a book only to have it rejected as fiction and then salivated over as memoir reveals more about the American publishing business and the reading public than it does of him. He spent untold time and energy creating something only to have it arbitrarily rejected, not because it was no good, but because in the capitalist system the publishers didn't think they'd make enough money on it. Yet when Frey turned the tables and exploited the system to get his due he is labeled the bad guy, while everyone else wags their fingers and cry, "For shame!"

Finally this leads to the liability of the publishing companies. With Frey it is understandable that he would have been a bit more difficult to catch as he used his real name and most of the events in the book were somewhat based upon his own life. Fair enough. With Seltzer, however, she did not even use her real name and everything in the book was false. All her publisher needed to do to find out the truth would have been to run a credit report to see that she had lied about everything. Sure she spoke with a put-on accent, but big deal. I don't recall anybody screaming foul play after going to see the Ziggy Stardust tour and wanting their money back because Ziggy Stardust turned out to be David Bowie. In the end it comes down to the fact that Seltzer was a writer. Did she lie? Yes. Should she have? Probably not. Should her book be judged horrible even after numerous glowing reviews just because it turns out to be false? Common sense would say no, yet the umbrage of the reviewers and the public know no bounds. Inexplicably they feel that Seltzer owes them everything because they forked out $15 buck for her book. The amazing thing is that the majority of those people that say this an outrage have probably fudged more than one resume in their lives. Who's the fiction writer now?

When I saw the author's photo in the New York Times, I thought, 'She is not half Native American.'
And lo and behold she is not.
Don't waste your time with this faker, and don't reward her or the sellers of this book on this site by paying way too much money for a copy of this book.

I had ordered this at the library even before the newstories had come out about the fraudulent nature of both book and author. I had read an article in the NYTimes magazine, with many photos, and though I had no idea at that time of any fakery, I remember thinking how odd it was that a young woman who had grown up in the ghetto, and who identified as part of the black gansta culture, would have a rather expensive looking home, decorated ala Pottery Barn. Additionally, she stated that her 8 year old daughter "was the first white baby she'd ever seen, so at first she thought there was something wrong with her" and that she was concieved with the first white man the author had ever slept with. Both these statements sounded rather implausible: who (even from TV) has not seen a white infant? and she's had many black boyfriends, but only ever got pregnant by the sole white boyfriend she had?

However, that in and of itself was not reason to refuse to read the book or to consider it false. But by the time the book came in, the newstory had broken. I mention this because before I could read "Love and Consequences" with an open mind, I knew the facts behind the case. Therefore, it is impossible for me to know how I would have reacted to it without bias, or how it might have fooled serious reviewers such as NYTs Michiko Kakutami. There is a suspicion I have that reviewers were weighted down with the sense of "political correctness" -- that if such a book WAS real, it would be improper not to treat it both seriously and gently...to overlook its obvious flaws.

How to review it then? as a "fake memoir" or a sincere piece of fiction? By either standard, I am afraid that "Love and Consequences" is not a very good book. I think without the drama of believing it was a real memoir, by a real "gangsta girl", no publisher would have given this a second look.

Readers (if you can get ahold of what is now a fairly rare edition) should be aware that most of the book is written in an annoying "ghetto-speak", full of phrases like "I dint kno u mah nigga", "Dizzam!" and "Wasssup?" This is incredibly annoying and difficult to read, and mostly unnecessary -- how is spelling "know" as K-N-O indicate anything, since they are pronounced the same way? (Sadly, NPR interviews with Ms. Seltzer indicate she actually talks in this sort of contrived patois, though she was raised in an affluent white neighborhood by her real parents, and attended a posh private school.)

The story is rambling and full of inconsistencies. Young Maggie is taken from her mother at the age of six, due to vague charge of molestation. (It is never clear whether this really happened, or was a mistake.) No mention is made of a father, and Maggie/Bree quickly forgets her real mother and home. This strikes an unbelievable note: a six year old would know and remember her real parents and ask about them. We aren't even told if the molestor was her mother, or someone else. If not her mother, why was no effort expended to try and reunite them, as is the norm with foster kids? What ever happened to the mother? Maggie/Bree never makes an attempt to locate her, even after she is emancipated at the age of 16.

The author also describes herself as being half Native American and half white, and as looking Mexican (despite a book jacket photo that clearly shows a white woman with pale skin and light brown hair). It strikes me as unusual that a social service agency would place an attractive white child in the roughest ghetto in LA, or that a Native American child would not be returned to her tribe. None of these odd circumstances are even discussed.

You would expect the book to show the voyage the author made from selling drugs and violent street life, to getting into college, but it's more of a rambling narrative lurching from set piece to another: people and dogs get killed, her foster brothers get thrown in jail, they run out of food, etc. In other words, its pretty much re-enforcing most of the stereotypes that middle class white Americans already carry around about "ghetto life", rather than challenging them. A avid viewer of the TV series "The Wire" could have cobbled this together from a mishmash of details on that show.

The book also ends abruptly, around the time that Maggie/Bree magically gets into college...in Oregon of all places. This had the potential to be the most fascinating part of the book -- how did a homegirl from a troubled background adjust to academic life, among privileged white classmates? Presumably she lived in a dorm, and on full scholarship -- how did that work out for her? How were her values tested and/or changed? But the book dodges all that by ending so suddenly and without transition or resolution.

In short, had I NOT known about the fraud behind the book, "Love and Consequences" was so dull and so hard to read with all the dialect, that I almost certainly would not have finished it, and by this time, it would be long forgotten. The only reason for reviewing or discussing it at this time is because there have been so many high profile frauds lately, that this one was discovered just as the book came into print and what it says on a much deeper level about the publishing industry -- how easily they are fooled when they see something they can exploit and "market", what an easy ride they give to authors who have a sympathic, handwringing sort of backstory....how important an attractive author, with an attractive marketable story, IS today and how it utterly outweighs the requirement that a book be of high quality...that it be LITERATURE and not simply the marketing means to an end.

Now -- that's a subject for a really good book, and I hope someone will write it.

Last week while I was on a trip I read the initial NYT review of this book and decided to stop at a bookstore and buy it. While traveling I read it in just a few days. Now that I'm back home, I just read the NYT article (Mar. 4) that the book is not a "memoir" but rather ALL falsehood and the author is not even who she says she is...but is going by a false name.

I am shocked. The publisher knew her for 3 years, nurtured her, and fell for her fabricated story too. The NYT interviewer fell for her story. The author's excuses are very lame indeed and do not justify any of her lies.

I was a bit drawn into the story because there were a few connections with my own life - Oregon, background in writing, working with poverty-stricken families in Head Start. But I, in a million years would NEVER write and publish a story - of all these things mixed together - as a MEMOIR! Besides the fact that she grew up in a wealthy family and none of the experiences talked about in the "memoir" were actually hers, the book was also written very poorly. While reading it, I thought to myself, "this is written poorly, but the poor girls hardly had any education". Now we find out that, in fact, she had a private prep school education (Shame on you, too, Campbell Hall!). This is absolutely trash! We can be very glad that her own sister turned her in before she started in on her book tour. Perhaps they should make her go anyway - on a Shame Tour. Can we hope that the publisher will ask for the royalty check back? They should! So much of the story is false - but what really gets to me is that she talks about going to University of Oregon to get out of LA and earn her degree. Couldn't the publisher at least checked that fact?

As readers, we are lead along a path, gaining empathy and hoping for things to work out for this lonely, little girl who seems to have everything working against her. Yes, there are really people like that - but this author is NOT one of them.

As writers, it's easy to look at our own and our acquaintances' experiences and weave them to make an interesting story. That's what writers do. But we call them "novels", certainly not "memoirs"!

I want my money back and I just might return to the bookstore and demand it! Please DON'T buy this book!

As noted in another review written in march 2008:
"as revealed by Cyndi Hoffman, Jones' (not her real name) sister, it's a memoir like no other because it's not a memoir - it's total fabrication.!!!!!!!!"
Yes as written in the LA times a few days agO its a work of fiction!
SEE ARTICLE BY BOB POOL..
...'SISTER BLEW THE WHISTLE...SHE GREW UP IN VALLEY,,,,,,SHE EVEN WENT TO AN EXCLUSIVE PRIVATE SCHOOL'

It is easy to blame the writer, but is the publisher not equally at fault? The taste for memoir and the fake ones that have been published have given the authentic memoir a black eye. And much excellent fiction will not be published. The writer then resorts to presenting it as autobiography. It sells. Only a few years ago gifted writers like Janet Fitch's novel, "White Oleander" could find a great readership. Her subject was also a girl growing up under horrific conditions in a string of foster homes. Fitch's writing is superior to Margaret B. Jones's, but even so, the most respected New York critics praised Jones's authentic voice. Would her voice be less authentic if she had absorbed it by listening to the slang of the streets along with its rhythm when she worked as a social worker in L.A.? It is demeaning to have to lie in order to get published. And I feel very sorry for her, apparently a woman of great talent who will now be sidelined for a long time. I hope for her sake not forever. It is not only Seltzer/Jones who is to blame, but all of us who have developed a voyeuristic appetite for the truly gruesome "true" story. Be they child soldiers in the Sierra Leone, or a mixed-race girl growing up in the ghetto of Los Angeles. Shame on all of us.

If you're looking for gritty, gripping realism, about what life is really like in the inner city of south central LA, look no further than this shocking tome from Native American author Margaret B. Jones! This book belongs in every multicultural studies program, and should be required reading in institutions of higher learning from Harvard to Berkeley!

The editorial comments from the esteemed list of reviewers speaks mountains for this excellent book - this list is a veritable "who's who" of the literary world - Michiko Kakutani (an esteemed NY Times literary critic!); Rebecca Walker! (daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker!); and none other than Oprah Winfrey's "O" Magazine! With glowing reviews from this heavyweight list, one simply scratches their head and wonders - How could all those "geniuses" on Wall Street screw up and create the subprime mess, yet not realize how wonderful this book is?

Barbara Robinette Moss, author of Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter, says it best in her elegant simplicity: "My God, Margaret is brave!"

Pick up a copy today!

The New York Times reviewed this book and lauded it for being so real and true to life and so on: Here's some examples the New York Times used:

("So five grown men beat 13-year-old Terrell for two minutes in the street.") She tells us about getting a .38 for her 13th birthday and learning how to cook up a batch of crack to pay her family's overdue water bill. She tells us about survival tips for visiting the local park. ("You must always scan the park, figure out who is where and the best escape route from each direction.")

You know, no wonder a very respectable Agent Faye Bender fell for such a thing--such engaging, brilliant prose, and RiverHead press couldn't turn it down, with words like that, breathtaking. "He got beat by five men for two minutes." In the street! What incandescent description.

And I don't think I'll ever look at a park the same without thinking the very same thing. "You must always scan the park, figure out who is where and the best escape route from each direction." Wow. Joycean in execution.

(It wouldn't have anything to do with a broken publishing scene in New York that sees dollar signs associated with anything remotely called a memoir, would it? Especially if it's by a young female ethnic group writer?)

Hmmm.

What a really dumb thing to do after the James Frey incident!

I read the writer of this book wanted to give a voice to people who weren't listened to. But that could easily have been done by writing and marketing this book as a novel.

Two of the best novels I've ever read, "She's Come Undone" and "Memoirs of a Geisha" had lead female characters that were both written by a male author. The author for Memoirs had two points going for him in that he's a Caucasion man writing in the voice of an Asian woman. What made these books so wonderful was that these authors could write about characters so different from themselves.

Too bad the Margret B. Jones and her publisher hadn't learned that lesson in Writing a Book 101. Dumb dumb dumb!

Why is this book being recalled by Riverhead Books (Penguin USA)? Because it is a complete and total FABRICATION! You can look up the exposes on the internet (The L.A. Times did a story on this as well as National Public Radio), if you so wish, for the sordid details.

Jones' story is about the gloomy life experiences of a 1/2 Native American gal surviving in urban poverty and chaos; however, as it turns out, the author is actually the WHITE upscale Californian, (North Hollywood) Margaret Seltzer! Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer.

Clearly, the publisher knew all this when they took Jones'/Seltzer on board. It's unbelievable that either an author or a publisher would try to pull a stunt like this, especially concerning an ethnically sensitive issue like the urban gang venue experience in America.

It just goes to show you that people will do anything for money. So if you want to read about ACTUAL urban ghetto chaos in America, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Shame on the author and Penguin!

It's sad to think that some people will actually profit from this pathological story.

I can't decide which word best describes this author!

Everyone knows by now, that this book is a fabrication, despite the author's claims of authenticity. What's sad in a pathetic sort of way is that according to some noted critics, the author is a talented writer.

I considered rush ordering a copy of this, because the publisher announced that they were recalling all copies, but I decided not to stoke the author's ego.

This, along with the several other recent well known fraud memoirs, shows a certain hollowness in the genre: even when we demand real life, we want sex, guns, and excitement, not real life.

The publishers are just as culpable: the lies unraveled so quickly that it's obvious that had they done even minimal fact checking, they would have quickly found the truth. As it were, her older sister read her reviewws and came forward with the truth. It'll be an interesting Thanksgiving at their house this year!

What is with these authors who write fabricated true stories, turn them into best selling books, and then are revealed to be totally false?

This otherwise decent book would have been totally acceptable if the author simply had the courage to say it was a NOVEL. Not non-fiction. It might not have had the "true life" appeal but the author would at least have had a career after the success of their first book.

The book publishers should just publish all future copies of the book replacing the word "memoir" with "novel" in the title. I wish the author all the best in the future, despite their dishonesty with this work. And I wish the best to other authors who made the same tragic mistakes with their supposedly "true life" books. Even though perhaps none of them may truly deserve forgiveness for what they've done by misleading the reading public and literary establishment.

We all make mistakes (this being a huge one). But I do believe in redemption. Think twice about maybe giving the book (and others like it) a chance regardless.

Read this as truth, and you'll be disappointed. Read it as fiction, and you'll probably be entertained.

"Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated" http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/04/arts/04fake.php

Oprah and NY Times will ALWAYS go gah-gah over any book that "proves" that American cities and families are corrupt and rotten. Even if they have to have fake books to substantiate it.

Why is this book being recalled by Riverhead Books (Penguin USA)? Because it is a complete and total FABRICATION! You can look up the exposes on the internet (The L.A. Times did a story on this as well as National Public Radio), if you so wish, for the sordid details.

Jones' story is about the gloomy life experiences of a black gal surviving in urban poverty and chaos; however, as it turns out, the author is actually the WHITE upscale Californian, (North Hollywood) Margaret Seltzer! Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer.

Clearly, the publisher knew all this when they took Jones'/Seltzer on board. It's unbelievable that either an author or a publisher would try to pull a stunt like this, especially concerning an ethnically sensitive issue like the black experience in America.

It just goes to show you that people will do anything for money. So if you want to read about the ACTUAL black experience in America, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Shame on the author and Penguin!

I just stumbled upon this quite by accident, and did read the review in the New York Times and... Also have read "Monster" and I am really a bit confused. Apparently this author is a very good writer, and for it to be reviewed by the NY Times is no small feat or was it only reviewed after it came out as a farce? All that said, if it is good literature and deals with an important subject matter, maybe it should be repackaged and sold as something from a vivid imagination. I detest liars, however "Writing" is one of those things where people that are creative have a bit of room to use the imagination. I think it's sad if the book is that good, that it is not going to be read now because of the storm but as someone else pointed out here, I think the publisher should have truly verified it for authenticity before releasing it to the public as being a true life story.

(Not only for the credibility factor but for the safety factor as well for their client).

I have no earthly clue as to why she would lie about this or college attendance, (The latter of which is all too easy to check), like apparently everyone else. But I do hope this is a life lesson for her. If it was good enough to garner a number four spot in attention on Amazon, I do hope she's learned from it and doesn't completely lay down her pen. (My rating of one by the way has no reflection on the content of the book itself. That could perhaps only go up by reading it). But instead, on the story that the writing of the book has created.

None are perfect and apparently she can write. Sadly the number of authors who also write and hope to garner this much attention, perhaps positively I might add, are seeing yet another thing where it seems that controversy garners more sells and visibility than talent. (Whether talent is present or not)...

Your Chance to Hear The Last Panther Speak

The inside jacket of this book breathlessly attests to its raw authenticity, stating, "In an unforgettable voice that weaves stunning, forthright narration together with the distinctive, rhythmic slang of the street, Margaret B. Jones brings us movingly into the world of her youth - a world of gangs and poverty, but also of hope and survival - to create a memoir like no other".

No kidding...

Actually, as revealed by Cyndi Hoffman, Jones' (not her real name) sister, it's a memoir like no other because it's not a memoir - it's total fabrication.

Too bad.

Jones seems to have hoodwinked everyone so the publisher can be forgiven.

As the author (?) earnestly writes in the introductory "Author's Note on Language, Dialect, and Kontent", Please do not confuse the use of slang and my replacing c's with k's as ignorance or stupidity".

No chance of that.

It's clearly cleverness, but not quite clever enough to pull off the scam.

I want my money back.

Check out today's NY Times (March 3). The author has admitted that she made up everything in the book, never belonged to a gang, is not mixed race and always lived with her biological family. She appears to be a pathological liar. But hey, she's creative.

Margaret B. Jones is actually Margaret Seltzer, who is 100% white, went to a private high school, never dealt drugs and never lived with a foster family. She was a tourist and wannabe in gangland, not a 'refugee' from it, as she was portrayed in a New York Times article. If you've already ordered this book, make sure you get your money back.

Former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair reported today that James Frey and Margaret B. Jones will write a non-fiction novel together as soon as they make up the facts. No lie.

Now that the NYT has "outed" Margaret for being a fake, we have yet another made up memoir. I wonder why in the world her editor didn't check any of her facts.

why do liberals want to force diversity down our throat so bad they have to fabricate stories to do it? this book is all lies

So sick and tired of liars.
It's ok to write a book filled with fiction.

QUOTE :In "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

QUOTE :Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Take this book off the availability list. Don't dupe anyone else in to buying it. The author admitted that all was fabricated!!! Persons bought it and critiqued it predicated upon it being a memoir. A memoir means true. Not even Henry Miller labeled his most true autobiographical novels "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn" as memoirs as they were not 100% factual. Don't editors or critics vet books anymore???!!!

This is just too bad. I'm tired of these kind of books. She could have just written a novel.

I don't know why another reviewer has tagged her as a liberal feminist. This book's lies have nothing to do with liberalism or feminism.

here we go again. how about fact checking? will book publishers respond by firing or punishing those who couldn't check facts before time and effort was wasted on this liar?

First a disclosure. I've only read the first chapter of this book, for free, on the NY Times website. However, since this appears to be one chapter more than many (maybe all) of the damning reviewers, I feel justified in offering an opinion. So far the book seems to be a good read, very entertaining, and apparently fact based. As the author stated in a recent interview, the book is based upon information gained from her extensive interactions with Los Angeles gang members. In effect, it is a psuedo memoir a novelistic device with a long and respectable history. For example, I'm currently reading another psuedo memoir, Julian: A Novel and the fact that I know that it wasn't actually written by a 4th century Roman emperor, nor annotated by two ancient Greek philosophers in no way detracts from the pleasure of reading. True Ms. "Jones" didn't initially label her book as fiction, but the fact that she was actually able to fool her publishers, over a three year period, (as well as numerous mass media reviewers) into believing that this was a real autobiography vividly demonstrates just how convincing an artifice she has created.

How is it that these liars don't have the sense to know that they WILL be caught, and their careers will be over. It appears that this author might actually have some talent, so why lie about the circumstances?

Boo! The author, editor and publisher should all be ashamed of themselves.