A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown

Crown Publishing Group, February 2006
Review by Vanessa Dora Murray

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over!

Cupcake Brown, an attorney who worked at one of the 25th largest law firms in the nation, has traveled all over the country to deliver a motivational speech. “My goal is to hopefully inspire as many people as I can and to let them know that no matter what challenges they may face in life, they’re not alone—and any challenge can be overcome,” she says in one of her many interviews since the writing of her debut book, A Piece of Cake.

A Piece of Cake is an awe-inspiring coming-of-age epic account—written in first-person and Brown’s own vernacular—of hope and survival.

At age 11 Brown finds her mother dead in bed. She is tossed into a sadistic foster home and her life spirals down into a world of physical abuse, rape, drugs, prostitution, and gang banging. By age 13 she finds herself pregnant by one of her johns but lose the unborn baby when she is brutally beaten by her foster mother’s daughter. By her 15th birthday she is told by doctors that she’ll never walk again after she is shot in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun by rival gang members in South Central Los Angeles. She does walk again. But her addiction to crack grows out of control. She hates her life and wants to die so she tries to contract AIDS. By her mid twenties, she walks past a window after living behind a dumpster for days, “And saw my reflection. My eyes were sunk in my head. My lips were burned and scabbed from the crack pipe. You could see my ribs. I had seen death before on other people. But I’d never seen it on me,” recalls Brown. That day was the beginning of her spiral up. She entered a drug rehab, got rid of toxic friends, and without a high school diploma or GED, Brown graduated college magna cum laude. In 2001 at the age of 37 Brown graduated nearly top of her class from the University of San Francisco Law School. Brown has received a slew of scholastic awards including the University of San Francisco School of Law’s Judge Harold J. Haley Award for Exceptional Distinction in Scholarship, Character and Activities, the McAuliffe Honor Society, the National Law School Dean’s List, and the San Diego State University’s Donald Leiffer Outstanding Alumni Award for Distinguished Service.

A brutally straightforward memoir, A Piece of Cake will have readers sniffling throughout this 480 page heart-wrencher sprinkled with a modest amount of humor.