A Golden Child Who Finally Captured Her Mother’s Love : MAMA’S GIRL, by Veronica Chambers (Riverhead; $22.95, 194 pages)

The home a reader enters in “Mama’s Girl” belongs to a black Caribbean immigrant family whose daily life is fraught with financial hardship, leavened with the comradeship of spirited, Spanish-speaking black women, and disrupted by harrowing and violent domestic warfare.

Chambers’ father, a former insurance agent-turned-nightclub performer, is financially irresponsible, egomaniacal and given to infantile rages. Her long-suffering Panamanian mother bears the financial burden and the brunt of her husband’s anger that once included a deliberate hammer blow to the head. Observing this increasingly violent union are Veronica and her younger brother. When the father finally leaves, privation, both financial and emotional, sets in.

This memoir can be read as the story of a black, unassimilated Caribbean family. It is also the story of many families in which domestic abuse reconfigures the players into predictable roles. There’s the abusive, absent father and Cecilia, the martyred mother. One child becomes the black sheep--her younger brother fails in school, winds up selling drugs and goes to jail. And the other turns golden--Veronica, from the get-go, achieves and achieves and achieves.

At the core of this book, however, is the mother-daughter relationship; it’s a standoff characterized by seemingly stubborn indifference on one side and obsession on the other. Veronica, yearning to capture her mother’s attention and affections, sets out to be the perfect child--the child who will gladly make budget Christmas lists, earn perfect grades and mother her mother, if that’s what it takes.

The hitch is, of course, that the exhausted, displaced Cecilia doesn’t have much attention or interest to give to her children, and what little she does have is primarily directed at her troubled son. This doesn’t stop Veronica from trying and hoping.

For example, Veronica finds her identity and a great release in double Dutch jump rope and desperately wants to share this joy with her mother, who is always too busy even to watch: “There is a space between the two ropes where nothing is better than being a black girl. The helix encircles you and protects you and there you are strong. I wish she’d let me show her. I could teach her how it feels.”

Cecilia remains impassive in the face of Veronica’s straight A’s, wishing only that her equally bright son would do better in school. When Veronica enrolls in high school, Chambers writes, “I told [the counselor] that I needed to be in the accelerated program and looked to my mother for support, but my mother said nothing.”

When Veronica consults her mother about going to college a year early, Cecilia refuses to give an opinion: “It’s your life. I can’t live it for you.”

Veronica’s survival skills--her achievements, perfectionism and self-reliance, her ability to endear herself to others outside the family--serve her well. Without help from her parents, she embarks on a triumphant undergraduate career.

Eventually, she finds a niche in magazine publishing and becomes one of two black editors at the New York Times magazine.

Once she sees that her daughter can indeed fend for herself, Cecilia begins to soften and come through for Veronica, first with care packages in college, then with much-needed affection and intimacy. Veronica, in turn, is completely forgiving. Of her mother, she says, “She is my beloved.”

Chambers’ youthful prose is clear-eyed, direct, competent and at times spirited. Hers is an intelligent reporting of one woman’s growing up that will serve as an inspiration for other intelligent young women trapped in similar poverty and emotional desolation.

While achievement is by far the preferred response to a difficult childhood, how much control do we really have over which role we take?

What makes Veronica achieve, as if energized by difficulty, while her brother, mired in anger, acts out? Could such responses be complementary, even interdependent?

Chambers inadvertently hints at this: “Yet I feel like I won’t ever be able to enjoy my life fully, to enjoy my successes without guilt as long as my brother is out here dealing drugs and getting arrested and beginning to think of jail as a second home.”

How will Chambers regard the same material in, say, 25 years, after the patterns established in her childhood have played out in her adult life? Let’s hope she keeps us posted.