A Critical Discourse Analysis of Family Literacy Practices: Power In and Out of Print. Rebecca Rogers. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003. Pp. 232. $69.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

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.