An affecting memoir that takes readers into the struggles of a life-threatening condition.
Cairns’ debut recounts her emotional journey of caring for two ill children, culminating in her daughter’s heart transplant.
When the Australian author was 19 years old, her parents introduced her to her future husband, then-15-year-old Lucas, and his family: “I could never have known…one day, that family, along with the health challenges ahead they had to face, would become mine too.” Years later, she and Lucas fell in love, got married, and moved from Sydney to the small town of Grafton, where they raised their young boy, Elijah. Soon they had a daughter, Luka-Angel, who was born with viral meningitis. After the birth of their third child, Jazziah, a doctor realized that the two youngest children had congenitally weak hearts—a condition called cardiomyopathy, which ran in the Cairns family. The children struggled to live normal lives with a condition that had the potential to put them into cardiac arrest with too much exertion. Finally, the family made the terrifying decision to put Luka on a waitlist for a heart transplant, despite the risks. They flew across the country at a moment’s notice so that young Luka could undergo the dangerous, life-changing procedure. The memoir’s first third is dragged down by tangential stories about family life and an upsetting account of an abusive neighbor. However, Cairns narrates the transplant itself with great care, depicting the delirium that comes from waiting countless hours for news as well as the long and uneasy road to full recovery. She’s also very effective at relating the sadness of restricted childhoods; at one point, for instance, she tells of having to drag young Jazz away from a race that he wanted to run. The author mixes in intimate diary entries, drawings, and photos that will help to give readers a fuller view of her emotional state throughout her ordeal.
An affecting memoir that takes readers into the struggles of a life-threatening condition.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973622-45-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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
