This boyhood memoir begins with five-year-old Jan running through the dark—a nighttime ritual he played out despite the chagrin of his chronically disapproving parents. Here, Myrdal (India Waits, 1986, etc.) describes his unconventional early years with a strong, sometimes disquieting candor, capturing the peculiar ways adults talk to children and conveying his own survival techniques (``Whatever you did it was important not to leave traces''; ``You had to choose your words so you were not understood''). Myrdal is the son of Nobel Laureates Gunnar and Alva, celebrated social scientists who failed to check their academic miens at the door. With no interest in the boy's feelings, Gunnar constantly scrutinized and joked about Jan's behavior with visiting friends; Alva, who recorded their conversations in a notebook, omitted Jan from her official records after 1940 and, when he was fully grown, denounced him to US immigration authorities. Both parents left him, early and often, in the care of relatives who at least provided an honest welcome and a sense of home. Meanwhile, Myrdal never developed much of a relationship with either of his preferred (and ostensibly planned) younger sisters—not Kaj, who neglected to tell her own daughter of his existence, nor Sissela (Bok), whom he here calls ``as phony as a three-Crown coin.'' Confused and angered by the family characterization of him as a ``problem child,'' the author was nevertheless able to make friends and connect with relatives, enjoy typical boyhood pleasures (attempting to build a tree house, jumping on ice floes), and retain an imaginative inner life that neither parent could violate for long. Myrdal pursues these memories and their emotional precipitates as vigorously he does as the scenes of family life. Myrdal's memoir caused a stir in Sweden, but even those who don't know the elder Myrdals and their work or the author's previous books will read it as an evocative re-creation of life as seen by a child.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-941702-29-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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