A pleasant chronicle of living life outside one’s comfort zone.
Account of a travel-happy American family bent on a “global” education for the children.
A former dance instructor at the University of Montana, Ragsdale takes a frank approach to observing life in Penedo, a colonial hill town in the northeastern Brazilian state of Alagoas, where the family of four serendipitously decided to move from Missoula for a year in 2010 and 2011. Fearless to embrace total immersion when no one, including the two children, knew any Portuguese, the family let the year unfold without trying to enforce a hurried American method to the laid-back, unbuttoned Brazilian way of life. Ragsdale grew up traveling abroad with her diplomat family, from Manila to Cairo, and had already lived with her writer husband, Peter, in places like Ghana, Indonesia, and Mozambique. They were ecstatic to find a cheap house in Penedo to rent and the ability to afford a full-time housekeeper and cook. Catholic school for their son, Skyler, 12, and daughter, Molly, 15, proved a challenge due to the language barrier, and making friends was difficult, especially for Skyler, who felt both criticized by the youth as well as adored by the girls for his blond strangeness. Enjoying little privacy or quiet—Ragsdale writes of having to let go of a Western sense of possession—the family was confronted by their senses of privilege and entitlement in terms of having the money to pay for things that the small-town Brazilians could not afford. In short, anecdotal passages the author recounts the ups and downs of daily life—befriending a series of 20-something guides, navigating the permissive teenage parties for her daughter, taking up capoeira, establishing relationships with the market vendors, and managing the rather bossy, cynical locals—with a pleasant candidness. In the end, she displays a deep gratitude for the eye-opening adventures.
A pleasant chronicle of living life outside one’s comfort zone.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-58005-586-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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