A powerful story of a survivor whose irrepressible personality shines throughout even her darkest moments.
Etler’s follow-up to her memoir, The Dead Inside (2017), charts her rocky high school years, fresh out of tough-love rehab.
When Cyndy Etler was 14, her mother sent her to Straight, Inc., an abusive rehab facility where she was brainwashed into believing that she was an addict, although she had only tried pot several times. After spending 16 months locked up, Cyndy is returned to her former life to find herself the “only clean and sober student” at Masuk High School. She feels intensely isolated from her peers, doing her best to maintain a low profile while tending to her sobriety. She takes comfort from attending various AA meetings and grasps desperately at whatever shreds of love and acceptance she can snatch, including a friendship with a sober friend that turns toxic and a string of fleeting, fraught encounters with boys that leave her feeling as unwanted as ever. Loneliness gives way to depression, which she eventually learns to combat with the help of a psychiatrist and an English teacher who encourages her to write. Etler’s gutsy present-tense narration of her feelings of insecurity and isolation is interwoven with the sublime moments of joy she experiences in music, in writing, and in her relationships; her prose dazzles with infectious verve.
A powerful story of a survivor whose irrepressible personality shines throughout even her darkest moments. (author’s note) (Memoir. 15-adult)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3576-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A tribute to young people’s resistance in the face of oppression.
In 1983 South Korea, Kim was learning to navigate university and student political activism.
The daughter of modest restaurant owners, Kim was apolitical—she just wanted to make her parents proud and be worthy of her tuition expenses. Following an administrator’s advice to avoid trouble and pursue extracurriculars, she joined a folk dance team where she met a fellow student who invited her into a banned book club. Kim was fearful at first, but her thirst for knowledge soon won out. As she learned the truth of her country’s oppressive fascist political environment, Kim became closer to the other book club members while the authorities grew increasingly desperate to identify and punish student dissidents. The kinetic manhwa drawing style skillfully captures the personal and political history of this eye-opening memoir. The disturbing elements of political corruption and loss of human rights are lightened by moving depictions of sweet, funny moments between friends as well as deft political maneuvering by Kim herself when she was eventually questioned by authorities. The art and dialogue complement each other as they express the tension that Kim and her friends felt as they tried to balance school, family, and romance with surviving in a dangerous political environment. References to fake news and a divisive government make this particularly timely; the only thing missing is a list for further reading.
A tribute to young people’s resistance in the face of oppression. (Graphic memoir. 14-adult)Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-945820-42-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Iron Circus Comics
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.
Full-immersion journalist Kidder (Home Town, 1999, etc.) tries valiantly to keep up with a front-line, muddy-and-bloody general in the war against infectious disease in Haiti and elsewhere.
The author occasionally confesses to weariness in this gripping account—and why not? Paul Farmer, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, appears to be almost preternaturally intelligent, productive, energetic, and devoted to his causes. So trotting alongside him up Haitian hills, through international airports and Siberian prisons and Cuban clinics, may be beyond the capacity of a mere mortal. Kidder begins with a swift account of his first meeting with Farmer in Haiti while working on a story about American soldiers, then describes his initial visit to the doctor’s clinic, where the journalist felt he’d “encountered a miracle.” Employing guile, grit, grins, and gifts from generous donors (especially Boston contractor Tom White), Farmer has created an oasis in Haiti where TB and AIDS meet their Waterloos. The doctor has an astonishing rapport with his patients and often travels by foot for hours over difficult terrain to treat them in their dwellings (“houses” would be far too grand a word). Kidder pauses to fill in Farmer’s amazing biography: his childhood in an eccentric family sounds like something from The Mosquito Coast; a love affair with Roald Dahl’s daughter ended amicably; his marriage to a Haitian anthropologist produced a daughter whom he sees infrequently thanks to his frenetic schedule. While studying at Duke and Harvard, Kidder writes, Farmer became obsessed with public health issues; even before he’d finished his degrees he was spending much of his time in Haiti establishing the clinic that would give him both immense personal satisfaction and unsurpassed credibility in the medical worlds he hopes to influence.
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50616-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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