A frank and often affecting memoir from a mother determined to do whatever it takes for her child.
Parenting a sick child takes a couple to the edge and back.
No one wants to hear that their child has a life-threatening illness which, if left unattended, could considerably shorten the child’s life. But if faced with such horrible news, one hopes to have the support and love of the other parent to help make decisions and get through the rough spots. In playwright Harpham’s emotion-packed memoir about her sick daughter, Gracie, she examines the conflicted feelings she had toward Brian, Gracie’s father, as the two navigated the complex world of a seriously ill child. Since Brian was not there for her during the pregnancy, the author wasn’t able to trust that he would continue to be there through the numerous blood transfusions that Gracie required. Readers see her open her heart and world to Brian only to clamp down when she gets nervous or scared, reacting perhaps to the semichaotic echoes of her own childhood that still tug on her emotionally. The author does justice to Brian’s love and affections, painting a well-rounded picture of a man who wants the best for his family as well as time and space for himself and his work as a writer. Throughout, Harpham provides detailed information about Gracie’s condition, which builds tension and anxiety as readers wonder if this little girl will ever get the medical treatment she needs to beat her disease. The author also discusses the other parents she befriended in the hospital, many of whose children also had serious illnesses. Although a personal story, Harpham’s memoir provides a larger, universal picture of unconditional love toward a child and the push-pull of an adult relationship and all its inherent highs and lows.
A frank and often affecting memoir from a mother determined to do whatever it takes for her child.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-13156-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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