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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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