A gut-wrenching, cleareyed coming-of-age memoir with thin storytelling.
In this memoir, self-help writer Engel (It Wasn’t Your Fault: Freeing Yourself from the Shame of Childhood Abuse with the Power of Self-Compassion, 2015, etc.) recounts a painful childhood.
Engel was raised in blue-collar Bakersfield, California, by her single mother, Olga. A resentful woman working low-income retail jobs, Olga often left young Engel alone or with neighbors during shifts. The consequences of this neglect crept into the author’s lonely childhood. Trouble began when a teenager forced 4-year-old Engel and her friend to engage in a sexual act. Four years later, Engel’s neighbor Ruby married a mentally unstable man who regularly molested Engel, leaving lifelong scars. Engel realized the hopelessness of her situation when she told her mother about the abuse and was not believed. Class issues dot the text; the author deftly depicts her poverty, noting the difficulties of not having a car and the pickle sandwiches she devoured. The memoir is adept at building emotional context for the reader. For example, tender moments with neighbor Ruby make her husband’s abuse all the more psychologically charged. The last quarter of the book, however, is less powerful. Incidents such as heartbreak and the discovery of a friend’s deception pale in comparison to Engel’s earlier experiences. Given the subject matter, both the prose and dramatic scenes could benefit from richer specificity. Still, the clean writing (“She hit me with such ferocity that it scared me more than it hurt”) well serves this account of a child’s abuse and survival.
A gut-wrenching, cleareyed coming-of-age memoir with thin storytelling.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-367-0
Page Count: 305
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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