An engrossing debut memoir from 40-something Goyen, a Texas wife and mother.
Goyen opens with a brief discussion about her suffering from chronic anxiety attacks in childhood and beyond and how she learned to cope. Then, before returning to that subject, she shares thoughts and ordinary experiences that came with being a parent (or in her case, fear of never being a mother) and stories from what she describes as her family’s normal, typical middle-American life. “You might be a lot like us,” she tells her readers. The most gripping section (and the longest) describes a gradually escalating medical issue that arose when the couple thought their problems were solved. Although Goyen had a stillborn child, she and her husband finally had two sons (born 19 months apart). Their happiness felt complete. Trouble returned when the youngest, 7-year-old Blake, fell deathly ill with mysterious symptoms. For months, while they went from doctor to doctor, taking him to the hospital (sometimes to the ER) for diagnoses and treatments, their happy life became a nightmare, and their faith was tested. The author’s detailed account reads almost like a detective story about a child and his family held hostage by illness. It’s easy to empathize and care with Goyen, and her chatty, confiding, openness as a writer makes her seem like a friend. Fans of Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, 1993) will recognize and appreciate a similar sense of authorial immediacy. Goyen conveys with lyric beauty how faith in God, love for her husband and devotion to her sons now guides her response to tragedy and her approach to life. The “river” in the title refers to the family’s favorite vacation spot in Red River, New Mexico, a place that “flowed straight to my soul like a river through my heart,” but it’s easy to feel that the real river she cherishes is that of God’s love.
A child’s illness becomes the focal point for a riveting true-life drama.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484912393
Page Count: 214
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 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
