A pointed, intelligently told story of a family accepting loss gracefully.
When a child dies, her immediate family members face grief, longing and rebuilding in this true story.
Flohr’s daughter Sarah was 16 when she died due to a freak car accident. The moment was devastating to her family, particularly her identical twin, Caiti. Yet every member of Sarah’s extended clan—including her divorced parents, her stepfather, her elementary school–aged brother and her grandparents—was left wondering how to restart his or her life after the trauma. The author felt this pain more acutely than most; her so-called “failures” as a parent and Sarah’s tempestuous nature clashed often, and she found peace elusive. She tries to piece together Sarah’s thoughts in the days and weeks before her death in this book and struggles to understand her grief process by taking a bird’s eye view of it. “ ‘There’s been an accident, and Sarah has been killed.’ The tears begin at that moment,” she writes. “I couldn’t know then that they would flow for the next five years, every day, and every night.” Although her loss was profound, the author managed to put herself outside her own sadness to take care of the tasks at hand: burying her child, repairing the damage to her second marriage, and raising two baby daughters and a son. On the edge of the story is the dazed Caiti, who wanders like a ghost throughout the narrative. The book is most compelling when we see Sarah’s side of the story, whether through her own writings or the author’s imagined play-by-play of her decision to get into that car on that summer night. The story honestly depicts a real family; the author doesn’t sugarcoat the ugliness of divorce or the anger of miscommunication. The book also provides no grand “life lesson,” which works in its favor. It shows that Sarah’s decision to get into that car that night wasn’t an act of rebellion; she was just a teen in search of food and adventure. Such a book on one’s nightstand, particularly if one is in the midst of the grieving process, could offer solace in a way that fiction never could.
A pointed, intelligently told story of a family accepting loss gracefully.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940598-15-4
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Book Publishers Network
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
