An odd, not always successful conflation of two stories—two artistic young people from separate centuries, one gone too...
While investigating the life of a Regency-era child artist, British novelist Myerson (Out of Breath, 2008, etc.) endures her own son’s drug addiction.
Mary Yelloly died in 1838, leaving behind a marvelous watercolor picture-book composed years earlier detailing the lives of an imaginary family closely based on her own. Who was she, and how did the premature death and loss of this unrealized talent alter the lives of the large, very real family she left behind? Myerson’s search for this “lost child” yields some answers, none terribly engrossing, but it quickly becomes clear that the Yelloly story is subordinate to that of another lost child, her own 17-year-old, who was addicted to skunk, a potent strain of cannabis more dangerous in some ways than heroin. The product of an emotionally abusive alcoholic father, Myerson resolved early on that for her own children, “There will never be any terrible, stupid rules. I will love them. I will just love them.” The inadequacy of this childrearing strategy—too late, she understands that love is not the solution, but rather “the most irresistible part of the problem”—became apparent as her son virtually abandoned school, vilely abused his parents, stole from them, trashed their home and gave his siblings drugs. Even after summoning the will, finally, to evict the boy from her home, the parents ended up paying for his casual girlfriend’s abortion and following his trail of stiffed landlords. As the inquiry into Yelloly closes with the discovery of her grave beneath a church carpet, Myerson’s relationship with her son, himself a would-be poet, remains strained, his drug dependency unresolved. Though her heart breaks, she resolves to maintain her tough-love stance toward a beloved child, about whom she writes with motherly tenderness.
An odd, not always successful conflation of two stories—two artistic young people from separate centuries, one gone too soon, the other, for now, missing in action.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-700-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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