A well-crafted, multiperspective view of the benefits of adoption.
A debut group memoir joins the voices of an adoptive mother, a birth mother, and the daughter they both love as they retell their experiences.
Counselor Alaina O’Connell got an unexpected chance to start over when, divorced in the early 1990s, she married her children’s piano teacher, Jason, and they adopted baby Sara. This book started life as a gift for Sara O’Connell. Among the narrative sections co-authored by Sara’s birth mother, Porter, are Alaina’s poems plus letters that passed between them. Porter was born in Germany but raised in the United States by a single mother after her father was killed in Vietnam. Both Alaina and Porter give a whirlwind tour through their separate upbringings before deftly focusing on the Seattle-area open adoption. With no money or support from her boyfriend, Duncan, pregnant Porter reluctantly decided on adoption. She interviewed five potential couples, choosing the O’Connells because the wife spoke German and the husband was musical. From the start, Alaina felt a mystical connection to this unborn child: “Our baby is about to be born.…She’s out there. We have to find her,” she insisted to Jason. Moving between the two mothers’ memories, the touching book offers subtly different perspectives on the same events and reveals how wrenching it was to set up terms for the open adoption. Initially Porter demanded to see Sara monthly and call anytime. “We were being manipulated.…What choice did we have?” Alaina mused. When the O’Connells decided not to allow more visits until Sara was of an age to request them, Porter felt betrayed. Despite the troubled nature of their relationship over the years, the women shared a deep connection through Sara. “You have a heart like mine,” Alaina wrote to Porter. “People like us…because we’re open, get hurt.” Poignant moments abound in this cogent, detailed work, as when 4-year-old Sara recounts to Porter the story of her birth as she understands it and when Sara visits Porter and her half sisters for the first time. A brief final section authored by Sara herself describes meeting her birth father.
A well-crafted, multiperspective view of the benefits of adoption.Pub Date: May 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8049-2
Page Count: 246
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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