Effectively employing the author’s fiction-writing talents to tell her life story, this memoir will likely cause readers to...
Novelist Vandenburgh (The Physics of Sunset, 1999, etc.) writes lyrically about her chaotic life.
The author has mined this material before: Her acclaimed first novel, Failure to Zigzag (1989), featured a teenage narrator with a mentally disturbed mother and a father who committed suicide—all drawn, we see here, from Vandenburgh’s difficult early years in California. Her depressed and troubled father, with whom she was very close, was repeatedly arrested in gay bars. He committed suicide by throwing himself off the roof of his office building in 1958, when she was just nine years old. Her mother, a freethinking artist, quickly spiraled downward into insanity, and was committed to a mental hospital. Vandenburgh and her two brothers were taken to live with an aunt and uncle who already had four kids of their own. The first half of the book, which recalls this lonely and troubled childhood, is exquisitely written and awash with poignant, moving details, like her description of how she left down the lid of her record-player after her mother was committed so that it would keep trapped forever the air her mother had breathed. Vandenburgh also does a wonderful job of documenting her teenage sexual awakening—hence the memoir’s title—and deftly captures the era: “Drugs haven’t happened yet, but you can feel them on the edge of things, waiting like the crisp paper wrapper on a noisy present.” The second half, which jumps ahead to adulthood, doesn’t quite match the tour-de-force of her childhood memories, but the whole is nonetheless striking and insightful.
Effectively employing the author’s fiction-writing talents to tell her life story, this memoir will likely cause readers to seek out her novels.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58243-459-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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