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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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SEEN & HEARD
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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